TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s president on Tuesday warned it could restart its nuclear program “within hours or days” if the Trump administration continued its confrontational policies toward the Islamic Republic.
President Hassan Rouhani’s remarks were a direct response to Trump’s increasingly bellicose rhetoric toward Iran and his announcement of fresh sanctions on individuals and businesses connected to Iran’s ballistic missile program.
Trump has also pledged to undo the 2015 agreement that Iran signed with the United States and five other world powers under which it suspended activities that could have led to the production of a nuclear bomb in exchange for a sharp reduction in international sanctions that had hammered its economy.
Rouhani told lawmakers in Iran that “sanctions and bullying” by Trump administration officials were the type of “failed policies that forced their predecessors to the negotiating table” to reach the landmark nuclear deal, one of the Obama administration’s signature foreign policy achievements.
Rouhani said Iran could quickly resume its nuclear activities and increase its quantities of enriched uranium — a precursor to building a nuclear bomb — to levels higher than before the agreement.
“If they want to return to the previous position, definitely, not within a week or a month, but within hours or days, we will be back to a much more advanced stage than we were during our last negotiations,” the state IRNA news agency quoted Rouhani as saying.
Rouhani has staked his presidency on the nuclear deal, and won re-election this year in part because the agreement remains widely popular in Iran, even among anti-Western hard-liners who believe it averted a military confrontation with the U.S.
It was the first time Rouhani threatened to break the agreement, a sign of how rapidly the war of words between the U.S. and Iran has escalated since Trump took office.
It was not clear if Rouhani’s comments were bluster or if Iran could indeed restart its nuclear activities quickly. United Nations inspectors have access to Iran’s nuclear facilities under the agreement and have said the Islamic Republic is complying with its terms.
But last week, the head of Iran’s atomic energy agency and an architect of the 2015 agreement, Ali Akbar Salehi, suggested Iran could return to 20 percent uranium enrichment levels “in four or five days … to catch (the U.S.) by surprise.”