The Donald Trump administration is using the State Department’s annual arms control compliance report to build upon its previous allegations that Iran may be violating the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT).
The State Department submitted a brief executive summary of the report to Congress today. This year’s executive summary bolsters the emphasis that last year’s report placed on the trove of documents that Israel says it obtained in a 2018 raid on an Iranian nuclear archive.
The 2019 report asserted that the archive itself “could potentially constitute a violation” of the NPT’s ban on nuclear weapons development. The summary of this year’s report goes a step further by noting that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported “articles of chemically processed uranium at an undeclared location in Iran.”
“Iran’s intentional failure to declare nuclear material subject to IAEA safeguards would constitute a clear violation of Iran’s [comprehensive safeguards assessment] required by the NPT and would constitute a violation of Article III of the NPT itself,” the executive summary says.
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