Biden’s Legacy: A Nuclear Iran
Biden’s Legacy: A Nuclear Iran
By Majid Rafizadeh
Originally Published by the Gatestone Institute.
The Biden administration seems to have no clear agenda on how to stop the Iranian regime from going nuclear. It has been almost a year and seven rounds of negotiations, but nothing has come out of these talks except that the ruling mullahs of Iran keep advancing their nuclear program, with Russia backing them.
The Iranian regime is playing with the Biden administration, most likely dragging out the negotiations — and accelerating its enrichment of uranium to weapons-grade — to buy time to become a nuclear state.
The Iranian regime, in fact, now has enough enriched uranium to produce weapons-grade uranium. The Institute for Science and International Security released a report on November 19 2021 that analyses and outlines the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) latest report on Iran’s nuclear activities. According to the Institute for Science and International Security:
“Iran has enough enriched uranium hexafluoride (UF6) in the form of near 20 and 60 percent enriched uranium to produce enough weapon-grade uranium (WGU), taken here as 25 kilograms (kg), for a single nuclear weapon in as little as three weeks. It could do so without using any of its stock of uranium enriched up to 5 percent as feedstock. The growth of Iran’s stocks of near 20 and 60 percent enriched uranium has dangerously reduced breakout timelines”.
In addition, the day after reaching an agreement to extend the monitoring mechanism of the IAEA by reinstalling surveillance cameras, the Iranian regime announced on December 15 that it will not allow the IAEA to see images from the surveillance cameras. “In other words, the agency will not have any access to the information before sanctions are lifted,” the Iranian regime’s state news agency IRNA said, quoting Behrouz Kamalvandi, a spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran.
The Iranian regime is currently advancing its nuclear program at a rapid pace, spinning centrifuges and enriching uranium at a high level, all while the international community has no access to monitor the regime’s nuclear activities to check how far away the Iranian government is from obtaining nuclear weapons.
While the Iranian leaders claim that the country’s nuclear program is designed for civilian purposes, for instance developing fuel for research reactors, the production of enriched uranium metal is a crucial step toward building nuclear weapons. A joint statement issued by the UK, France and Germany acknowledged that the Iranian regime “has no credible civilian need for uranium metal R&D and production, which are a key step in the development of a nuclear weapon.” Moreover, the Iranian regime’s nuclear file has been filled with clandestine nuclear sites and activities — another indication that the Islamic Republic is intends to become a nuclear weapons state.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is completely silent as the Iranian regime disregards and refuses to answer the IAEA’s questions about three undeclared clandestine nuclear sites in Iran. IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi recently warned:
“The lack of progress in clarifying the agency’s questions concerning the correctness and completeness of Iran’s safeguards declarations seriously affects the ability of the agency to provide assurance of the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program. For objectivity’s sake, I should say that the Iranian government has reiterated its will to engage and to cooperate and to provide answers, but they haven’t done that so far. So I hope this may change, but as we speak, we haven’t had any concrete progress.”
All the Biden administration has done so far is to appease a regime that chants “Death to America,” “Death to Israel,” and that is determined to push the US out of the Middle East.
Iran — one of only four state sponsors of terrorism, according to the US Department of State, as well as a leading violator of human rights — is also committed to uprooting and replacing Israel and seizing all the oil in the Middle East from Syria to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States.
The Biden administration has so far lifted a series of sanctions on the Iranian regime. On July 2, sanctions against three Iranians were also lifted under Executive Order 13382. These individuals had also been sanctioned by the previous US administration for their involvement in advancing Iran’s ballistic missile program. Moreover, on June 10, the Biden administration removed sanctions on three former Iranian government officials and two Iranian companies involved in the country’s oil industry.
So, we are just to sit back and watch the predatory, terrorist regime of Iran, which has already begun taking over the entire Middle East, become nuclear state and wreck the Middle East — under the Biden administration’s watch.
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a business strategist and advisor, Harvard-educated scholar, political scientist, board member of Harvard International Review, and president of the International American Council on the Middle East. He has authored several books on Islam and US foreign policy. He can be reached at [email protected]