Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said it would be easy to verify Iran was not
developing atomic weapons, state TV reported on Thursday, a day after U.S. President Donald Trump said he would like to have a verified nuclear peace agreement with Tehran.
Iran is not seeking a nuclear weapon as the mass killing of innocent people is prohibited in the Islamic Republic’s doctrine, Pezeshkian said in a televised meeting with foreign
ambassadors in Tehran.
“Verifying [our nuclear programme] is an easy task, they have come and verified every time they wanted to do so and they can come verify a hundred more times,” Pezeshkian said.
Trump said on Wednesday he would like to have a verified nuclear peace agreement with Iran. During his previous term in office in 2018, Trump pulled the United States out of Tehran’s 2015 nuclear pact with world powers and reimposed sanctions that have crippled the country’s economy.
The harsh measures prompted Tehran to violate the pact’s nuclear limitations.
Pezeshkian’s comments come a day after a senior Iranian official told Reuters Iran is ready to give the United States a chance to resolve disputes.
But reports indicated US intelligence as suspecting that Iranian scientists were working on how to quickly develop a nuclear weapon if the political leadership wanted one. This could include converting uranium stocks into a weapon within months not years.
The sense is that after being battered by Israel and seen its proxies suffer heavy losses, Iran could go for what is described as an “older style nuclear weapon” that could be put together faster. It would not fit into a missile but it is something Iran could test and declare itself a nuclear power.
With the IAEA warning that Iran could press the gas pedal on its nuclear programme, the concern in Tehran is that Trump might give Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu the go ahead to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities while tightening sanctions on its oil industry.
With Reuters inputs
