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The underground nuclear facility in Fordo
Photo: HO HANDOUT / EPA-EFE / REX
Since Monday, Iran's leadership in Vienna has been negotiating indirectly with the United States for the first time in five months.
It's about how the nuclear program can be scaled back if US sanctions against the country are lifted at the same time.
Despite the talks, the leadership in Tehran is apparently continuing to enrich uranium.
This is the assessment made by experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) after a visit to the underground facility in Fordow.
There uranium has been enriched to 20 percent using modern centrifuges.
A degree of purity of around 90 percent is required for the construction of nuclear weapons.
In the international nuclear agreement of 2015, a limit of 3.67 percent is set for Iran.
With the 2015 agreement, the Islamic Republic's nuclear program was severely restricted in order to prevent the development of nuclear weapons using uranium or plutonium.
Among other things, Tehran had undertaken not to use any centrifuges in Fordow that could produce fissile material particularly quickly.
Germany is also involved in the agreement that is supposed to make the path to the atomic bomb more difficult for Iran.
European diplomats had hoped for a signal of goodwill from Iran just at the start of the new round of talks.
The United States withdrew from the nuclear deal in 2018 under then-President Donald Trump and imposed severe economic sanctions.
After that, Tehran began to gradually break the nuclear agreement.
Before the Vienna negotiations began, the US government threatened consequences if the new leadership in Tehran continued to delay a solution in the negotiations on a new nuclear deal.
The US chief negotiator Robert Malley announced.
The Iranian chief negotiator Ali Bagheri, on the other hand, accused his Western counterparts of a lack of sincerity.
"In our experience, the West does not want to implement the pact," he said in a comment in the London Financial Times.
as / dpa / Reuters
