Iran Resumes 3.76% Enrichment of Uranium, Bucking Trump’s Offer for a Phone Call
by Jordan Hilger, Worthy News Correspondent
(Worthy News) - Iran has resumed its enrichment of uranium, quadrupling its enrichment capacity, the Iranian state-run IRNA news agency reports.
Behrouz Kamalvandi, the spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, was quoted as saying Iran would begin enriching uranium at 3.76%, the prescribed limit under the terms of the 2015 nuclear accord.
The commander of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, Major General Hossein Salami, said last Wednesday that his country was “on the cusp of a full-scale confrontation with the enemy,” according to the Fars news agency, calling the current standoff with the US “the most decisive moment of the Islamic Revolution.”
Besides the deployment of four B-52 Stratofortress bombers, the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group, and a new battery of Patriot missiles to the Middle East, the US withdrew all nonessential personnel from its embassy in Iraq following rocket fire Sunday night that seemed to have originated in an area of eastern Baghdad populated by Shi’ite militias loyal to Iran.
Saudi Arabian officials last Thursday, moreover, confidently attributed drone attacks on a Saudi oil pipeline to Iran-backed Yemeni Houthi rebels, with Prince Khalid bin Salman saying the recent terrorism against his country’s oil assets “proves that these militias are merely a tool that Iran’s regime uses to implement its expansionist agenda.”
Although uranium enriched at 3.76% is not enough to produce a nuclear weapon, Iran said it intends to resume enrichment at weapons-grade levels on July 7th barring any major reversals on sanctions from the Trump administration.