Atomic Energy Chief Says Iran Can Build Nuclear Bombs, But Has No Intention To Do It

Iranian missiles at the IRGC Air Force exhibition. (Wikimedia Commons/Fars Media Corporation/M. Sadegh Nikgostar)

JAKARTA - Iran has the technical means to make a nuclear bomb but has no intention of doing so, the country's atomic energy chief Mohammad Eslami said Monday.

The comments from Eslami, reported by state news agency Fars, were the second statement made by a senior Iranian official in recent weeks about a nuclear bomb.

Kamal Kharrazi, senior adviser to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, made a similar statement in July.

However, his comments were seen as suggestions the country might be interested in making weapons using enriched uranium, despite a 2003 fatwa by Khamenei prohibiting the production of any form of weapons of mass destruction.

Although the United States, Israel and other Middle Eastern countries have expressed concern about Iran's nuclear enrichment for military purposes, Tehran denies its intention to build an atomic bomb.

However, Iran is already enriching uranium to fissile purity of up to 60 percent, well above the 3.67 percent limit set under the now tattered 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.

Meanwhile, to make a nuclear bomb, uranium needs to be enriched to 90 percent.

"Within a few days we can enrich uranium up to 60 percent and we can easily produce 90 percent enriched uranium," Kamal Kharrazi said, as quoted by Al Jazeera.

In 2018, Donald Trump, the US president at the time, exited the nuclear pact (2015 Nuclear Deal), under which Iran curbed its uranium enrichment work, a potential pathway to nuclear weapons, in exchange for relief from international economic sanctions.

Iran has responded to a proposal by top EU diplomat Josep Borrell aimed at salvaging the nuclear deal, and is seeking a quick conclusion to negotiations, Tehran's top nuclear negotiator said on Sunday.

On Tuesday last week, Borrell said he had proposed a new draft text to revive the deal.

"After exchanging messages last week and reviewing the proposed text, it is possible that in the near future, we will be able to reach a conclusion on the timing of a new round of nuclear negotiations," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani said.

The outline of the revived deal was essentially agreed in March, after 11 months of indirect talks in Vienna between Tehran and the administration of US President Joe Biden.

But talks later fell through due to obstacles such as Iran's demand that Washington should provide assurances that no US president would walk away from the deal in the same way that Trump did.

Meanwhile, President Biden's administration has said it cannot promise this, because the nuclear deal is a non-binding political understanding, not a legally binding agreement.