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Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

Iran to Resume Vienna Nuclear Talks: Foreign Ministry


Sat 09 Oct 2021 | 05:53 PM
Ahmad El-Assasy

After reviewing the previous round of discussions, Iran's Foreign Ministry Spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh announced that Tehran has chosen to resume nuclear talks in Vienna.

Tehran has yet to complete its analysis of the previous nuclear discussions, according to state news agency IRNA, which cited the spokesman's interview with France24 on Saturday.

Khatibzadeh didn't give a specific date for when Iran's evaluation will be completed, but said it would be sooner than the deadline for US President Joe Biden's administration to attend the Vienna negotiations.

The head of Israeli military intelligence (known as AMAN), Tamer Hayman, said that Iran cannot acquire nuclear weapons in the short term.

Hayman added that Tehran is likely to try to exhaust long negotiations with the West as she moves forward with uranium enrichment.

In an interview with the Israeli “Walla” website, Hayman described Iran’s enriched uranium levels as “alarming”, stressing that Tehran still has a long way to go before it acquires an effective nuclear bomb that could threaten Israel.

He said that the Iranians have 3 options, either to return to the previous 2015 nuclear agreement, or to proceed with an unprecedented challenge, including the pursuit of armaments and the continuation of enrichment, or to go to an agreement through which they achieve much of what was achieved in the past.

Hayman revealed that Israel has a practical and reliable military option towards Iran and its nuclear program in addition to economic tools, affirming the need to take Iran in the direction that Israel wants, along with diplomacy, and to reach a better agreement.

However, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told the United Nations General Assembly days earlier that Iran seeks to dominate the Middle East “under a nuclear umbrella.”

“Words do not stop centrifuges and we will not allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon.”

The Iranian authorities called on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to condemn the “Israeli terrorist attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

The Iranian IAEA delegate in Vienna, Kazem Gharibabadi, said in a television interview, that if the agency “is going to carry out monitoring work, it must act responsibly and explicitly condemn terrorist attacks on Iranian facilities.”

He confirmed the need to “prevent America and its Western allies from the terrorist acts carried out by the Zionist entity (Israel) if they want to continue the agency’s supervision and its acts of oversight work in Iran.”