BICOM

Iran’s Ambassador Hamid Baeidinejad said to Britain has said Iran will consider walking away from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear deal if the US withdraws from the agreement on 12 May.

He told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that when the US, an “important party to the treaty, is out of the deal,” it means that “there is no deal left”.

US President Donald Trump will decide whether to waive US sanctions against Iran, as required under the JCPOA, on 12 May. If Trump decides not to waive the sanctions he will be in violation of the agreement and risk its collapse.

Baeidinejad, who helped negotiate the nuclear deal, said Tehran was exploring various responses to a US withdrawal, including restarting nuclear activities. “It could be enriching uranium, it could be redefining our cooperation with the agency and some other activities that are under consideration,” he said. He denied that Iran would restart any nuclear weapons production.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Tuesday that the Trump administration is “deciding on the next steps for the flawed [deal]”. Yesterday, during a trip to Australia, French President Emmanuel Macron said that the deal was “not sufficient” in countering all Iran’s destabilising activities in the region. Last week Macron told the US Congress that a new comprehensive deal with Iran was possible.

Iran has rejected any attempts to renegotiate or amend the JCPOA nuclear deal. Baeidinejad said it was “totally unacceptable” for the deal’s implementation to be conditional on new agreements. The “JCPOA was negotiated on its own merits, and still it’s working and it should be continued to be enforced,” he argued.

Baeidinejad also said the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) final assessment of Iran’s previous nuclear weapons activity ahead of the 2015 nuclear deal contradicted the announcement by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday night. Netanyahu revelved that Iran had lied to international observers about its nuclear weapons programme after Israel’s intelligence agency stole thousands of documents from a warehouse containing a secret Iranian nuclear archive, containing “incriminating documents, incriminating charts, incriminating presentations, incriminating blueprints, incriminating photos, incriminating videos and more”.

Netanyahu said that in the coming days Israel will share the information with Britain, France and Germany.