SULAIMANI (ESTA) — The United States believes Iran’s breakout time to producing enough highly enriched uranium for one nuclear weapon is now “really short” and alarming, a senior Biden administration official told reporters on Friday.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, did not have a precise time for the breakout, which has been estimated to be a matter of months.
“But it’s really short. It is unacceptably short,” Reuters quoted the official as saying, calling it “alarming”.
The official said Andrea Gacki, the Treasury Department’s director of foreign asset control, was in the United Arab Emirates earlier this week urging private companies not to evade sanctions against Iran.
“If you are evading sanctions, the U.S. will have its eye very much on you. There will be consequences,” the official said.
Indirect talks between the United States and Iran on bringing both sides back into full compliance with the 2015 nuclear Iran adjourned on Friday for at least 10 days.
The talks have made little discernible progress since they resumed more than two weeks ago for the first time since Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi was elected in June.
The negotiations are “not going well” in that the United States does not yet have a path back into the deal, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said in Washington, according to Reuters.
“We don’t have months, we rather have weeks to have an agreement,” EU envoy Enrique Mora said after a meeting that formally ended the seventh round of talks.
Mora and other officials said Iranian demands had been incorporated into the existing text so as to have a common basis for negotiation, but three European powers that are parties to the 2015 deal sounded less optimistic.
“There has been some technical progress in the last 24 hours, but this only takes us back nearer to where the talks stood in June,” negotiators from France, Britain and Germany, the so-called E3, said in a statement, Reuters reported.
They described the break as “a disappointing pause in negotiations”.
Iranian officials did not explain why they had requested a break other than to say there would be consultations in Tehran.
“If the other party accepts Iran’s logical views, the next round of talks can be the last round,” Iran’s chief negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani told reporters.
