NCRI – A week after signing the nuclear deal in Geneva, leaders of the clerical regime ruling Iran who view abandoning nuclear weapons as a deadly blow to their rule, are on one hand preparing to break the agreement and on the other hand trying to demonstrate to their internal critics through falsifications and propaganda that they have scored a great victory.
Ali Akbar Salehi, President Hassan Rouhani’s deputy and head of regime’s atomic agency, said in remarks on December 1 that vividly violate the Geneva agreement: “Iran shall never abandon the Arak heavy-water reactor. This is our red line in our talks with world powers.”
And to put blame the world powers in advance, he added: “If the West does not live up to its agreement and confronts us, our nation will create a situation even greater than the Iran-Iraq war of 1980s.”
And with a show of more hollow muscle-flexing, he announced the construction of yet another nuclear reactor in Bushehr next year, stating: “Russia has reported on building another nuclear reactor for generating an annual 4,000 megawatts of electricity.”
This is while the 1,000 megawatt reactor in Bushehr whose contract was signed 37 years ago still remains unfinished.
On the same day, the mullahs’ deputy foreign minister Abbas Araqchi admitted in an interview with the state-run media that the regime intended to continue with its nuclear weapons project.
He said: “We have agreed not to expand our program in terms of quantity, but in terms of quality we will expand it, and its structure shall be wholly preserved.
“The text of the agreement between Iran and the P5+1 cannot be considered a legal agreement with obligatory commitments. It is rather a political statement. As a first step, all actions are such that they preserve the whole architecture of Iran’s nuclear program. There is no rolling it back. We have 19,000 centrifuges of the first generation and we are currently working on higher generation centrifuges. Our commitment was that we would not expand these centrifuges and follow up work on higher generation centrifuges. Our program has reached full maturity and there is no scaling it back.”
Meanwhile, Araqchi blamed the regime’s parliament for not accepting the NPT’s Additional Protocol, adding: “By refusing to ratify it, the parliament can stop everything and this is in the interests of the country. We have given this right to the parliament that at the end of the negotiations it can veto it. This is a great privilege for the country.”
Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
December 2, 2013
