Breaking Defense:

By HENRY SOKOLSKI

Early this morning, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, rejected America’s proposal to create a regional uranium enrichment plant and eventually eliminate Iranian nuclear fuel making. “The proposal that the Americans have presented,” he insisted, “is 100% against [Tehran’s] interests.”

Washington has long argued that Iranian uranium enrichment constitutes nuclear weaponization and would allow Iran to get a bomb at any time; Tehran, for its part, maintains it has a “right” to enrich. These positions leave little room for compromise. Either Washington permits Iran to make nuclear fuel, allowing for a deal, or it doesn’t, and the talks fail.

Meanwhile, the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany are pushing the International Atomic Energy Agency to report to the United Nations Security Council that Iran has violated its nuclear safeguard obligations. The agency will meet to consider this request on June 9. This may trigger more economic sanctions against Tehran.

What happens next could endanger the last international legal barrier to nuclear proliferation — the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). Iran has threatened that if it is sanctioned for exercising its nuclear right to enrich, it will withdraw from the treaty. Washington now should prepare for this. Unfortunately, it hasn’t — at the latest NPT Preparatory Review Conference in New York, US officials did not even bring the matter up.

That’s a mistake. Based on history, withdrawing from the NPT is a direct path towards nuclear weapons.

North Korea’s NPT withdrawal two decades ago demonstrates why. In 1994, The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) found Pyongyang in violation of its nuclear safeguard obligations. Pyongyang responded by barring further IAEA inspection and initiating withdrawing from the NPT.

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