ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iran will consider dropping out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in case the “snapback” mechanism is enforced in the coming days of the nuclear talks, an Iranian official said on Tuesday.
“According to the deputy foreign minister's report, if snapback is activated, leaving the NPT is one of our options,” Ebrahim Rezaei, the spokesman of the parliament's national security and foreign policy commission, said in a presser, as reported by the state IRNA news agency.
The “snapback” mechanism described in the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), restores United Nations sanctions against Iran that were lifted under the agreement.
Iran held nuclear talks with France, Germany, and the United Kingdom on Friday, days after the UN nuclear watchdog adopted a resolution accusing Iran of a lack of cooperation, to which Tehran responded by announcing it would begin operating new, more advanced centrifuges.
Iran’s deputy foreign minister for political affairs Majid Takht Ravanchi and its deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs Kazem Gharibabadi attended the Friday meeting.
“We did not negotiate in Geneva, but simply discussed and exchanged opinions,” Rezaei added.
The meeting was aimed at defining Iran’s “framework” in order to cooperate with Western states, he added, but admitted that negotiations are still distant.
Tehran has always maintained that its nuclear program is peaceful and it is not pursuing an atomic bomb, but Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi issued a warning ahead of Friday’s meeting, saying that the debate in Iran could shift if the West follows through on its threat to reimpose UN sanctions.
Under a 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, Iran agreed to curb its nuclear enrichment program in exchange for much-needed relief from crippling sanctions. The deal began unraveling in 2018, when Washington, under Donald Trump’s first administration, unilaterally withdrew from the accord and re-imposed a sanction regime of “maximum pressure” on the Islamic republic.
Iran described the Trump administration’s attempt in 2018 to initiate the “snapback” sanctions as an “extreme case of bad faith.”
In November, Araghchi told UN nuclear watchdog chief Rafael Grossi that Tehran will continue its “full cooperation” with the body to ensure compliance through a “peaceful” nuclear program.
In February, the US said it was “seriously concerned” about the expansion of Iran’s nuclear program and slammed Tehran’s cooperation as “severely lacking.”
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