President Trump will let countries helping to overhaul three Iranian nuclear facilities escape sanctions that have been reimposed as part of the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear agreement, the State Department confirmed Monday.
“We are not issuing waivers for any new civil nuclear projects,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert’s office said in a Monday bulletin. “We are only permitting the continuation for a temporary period of certain ongoing projects that impede Iran’s ability to reconstitute its weapons program and that lock in the nuclear status quo until we can secure a stronger deal that fully and firmly addresses all of our concerns.”
The waivers will allow European countries to continue “nonproliferation projects” at three sites, including one that was central to Iran’s military nuclear program. It’s a disappointment for advocates of the most aggressive crackdown on the 2015 nuclear deal, but the administration and some nonproliferation experts suggest the projects will undermine the regime’s nuclear weapons capacity.
“It’s about converting existing infrastructure for purely civilian use, taking it from whatever military program was budding before to a purely civilian nuclear program,” a source familiar with the decision told the Washington Examiner on Friday. “It’s good that those projects are able to continue.”
The waivers apply to projects at Arak, Fordow, and Bushehr nuclear facilities. “Permitting these specific activities to continue is an interim measure that preserves oversight of Iran’s civil nuclear program,” Nauert’s team explained. “It enables the United States and our partners to reduce the proliferation risks at Arak, maintain safe oversight of operations at Bushehr, limit Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium, and prevent the regime from reconstituting sites such as Fordow for proliferation-sensitive purposes. This oversight enhances our ability to constrain Iran’s program and keep pressure on the regime while we pursue a new, stronger deal.”
The decision drew mixed reviews from critics of the Iran deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. “Arak is fine, nuclear safety [at Bushehr] is fine,” David Albright, founder of the Institute for Science and International Security, told the Washington Examiner. “Fordow is really kind of irritating to have to accept, because we know that that’s where they wanted to make weapons-grade uranium and they were designing the plant to do that until they were caught red-handed in 2009. So, it’s kind of a tainted facility.”
Richard Goldberg, a sanctions expert who helped draft some of the Senate bills used to crack down on the regime in the run-up to the 2015 deal, was more frustrated.
“Allowing this cooperation to continue rather than demanding complete dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure is a continuation of the Obama administration’s failed policies,” he continued. “We are not in the JCPOA anymore, Secretary Pompeo called the deal fatally flawed, yet the State Department policy is to support the deal’s implementation? Something doesn’t compute.”
Pompeo defended the waivers earlier Monday.
“It’s a pretty complicated area, that nonproliferation issue,” he told reporters. “What we’ve authorized is very narrow, very limited, very time limited as well, but important nonetheless that these nonproliferation projects are not things that are taking place without some ability to see what’s going on, and we’ll give you the full details of the scope of those waivers.”
