Iran may resume producing enriched uranium inside months, U.N. nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi warned Sunday, casting doubt on the effectiveness of latest U.S. strikes aimed toward crippling Tehran’s nuclear program.
U.S. officers have acknowledged that their strikes obliterated key nuclear websites in Iran, though U.S. President Donald Trump mentioned Friday he would think about bombing Iran once more if Tehran is enriching uranium to worrisome ranges.
“The capacities they have are there. They can have, you know, in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium, or less than that,” Grossi advised CBS News in an interview.
“Frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there,” he added, in line with the transcript of an interview on “Face the Nation” with Margaret Brennan attributable to air Sunday.
Saying it needed to take away any probability of Tehran growing nuclear weapons, Israel launched assaults on Iran earlier this month, igniting a 12-day air battle that the U.S. ultimately joined.
Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceable functions solely.
Grossi, who heads the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, mentioned the strikes on websites in Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan had considerably set again Iran’s means to transform and enrich uranium.
However, Western powers stress that Iran’s nuclear advances present it with an irreversible data achieve, suggesting that whereas dropping specialists or services might sluggish progress, the advances are everlasting.
“Iran is a very sophisticated country in terms of nuclear technology,” Grossi mentioned. “So you cannot disinvent this. You cannot undo the knowledge that you have or the capacities that you have.”
Grossi was additionally requested about studies of Iran shifting its inventory of extremely enriched uranium within the run-up to the U.S. strikes and mentioned it was not clear the place that materials was.
“So some could have been destroyed as part of the attack, but some could have been moved,” he mentioned.
Source: www.dailysabah.com