Iran is shipping its stockpile of enriched uranium to Russia, a major step to comply with the nuclear deal struck between the P5+1 Powers and Iran. According experts and diplomats following and overseeing the deal, this will leave Iran with too little fuel to manufacture a nuclear weapon. The shipment was announced by US Secretary of State John Kerry and confirmed by Rosatom, the Russian civilian nuclear company handling the shipment. American officials said that it may be only weeks before the deal’s sanctions relief measures go into effect on “implementation day.”
This will unfreeze almost $100 billion in Iranian assets and the country will be able to sell oil in world markets, as well as participate in global capital markets. While the Iranian government is still disassembling centrifuges at a snail’s pace and disabling a plutonium reactor, this is the first positive commitment to the deal since last July. However, many conservatives from the US are decrying the apparent milestone on account of the fact that the uranium shipment is a “fuel swap,” which is to say that Iran is receiving unenriched uranium from Kazakhstan in exchange for its enriched materials. Obama Administration officials and most analyst believe this measure is to save face, as the unenriched material would require substantial processing in order to be viable fissile material for a weapon.
This raises the so-called “breakout time” or the time it would take for Iran to produce a nuclear weapon from 2-3 months to 6-9 months. Before “implementation day” can be fully enacted, that breakout period must be an entire year. The effect of implementation day is seen as both a blessing, in the opening of the world’s largest remaining frontier market on the one hand, and the flooding of global markets with even more barrels of oil on the other.
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