The end of the negotiations and the explosion in Natanz

No sooner had we started covering the seventh round of talks on Iran's return to the nuclear deal in Vienna than the process ended.

As early as December 2, 2021, nervousness reigned in Vienna: what will the Iranians say in the end, what consensus did they reach in Tehran, what will the leading Iranian negotiator Ali Bagheri, whom I wrote about in the last column, announce tomorrow?

And now on December 3, the intrigue has melted like smoke.

Iran's "renewed approach", which the leading Russian negotiator, Russia's Permanent Representative in Vienna Mikhail Ulyanov, hinted about yesterday, only added new points of Iran's demands on the United States.

And here are the ones.

On December 3, 2021, Mehr, one of the leading Iranian media outlets, released a "mission statement" by the Iranian Ayatollahs regarding the Vienna talks.

In fact, this was Tehran's position, voiced at the very beginning of the Vienna negotiating day.

"The Iranian people want a complete lifting of sanctions," Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami said at Friday prayers in Tehran, addressing this message to the negotiators in Vienna (and the Iranian TASS urgently published it).

Prior to that, other high-ranking Iranian mullahs also sent “letters of happiness” to the Viennese negotiators in the same way through the media. From the pages of national newspapers, they "instructed" their negotiators that the United States should lift all sanctions at once, sign a guarantee that it will never ruin the deal again under any other president, and - best of all - the mullahs rolled out to the Americans a huge, billion dollar bill of "compensation" for damage caused by sanctions. In a word, everything is according to the classics "Tales of the Fisherman and the Fish" by our Alexander Sergeevich. It is not known whether Ali Bagheri voiced the last demand of the mullahs to the White House, but that was enough.

The result is predictable - on December 3, 2021, in the evening, President Macron sends the first lightning through France 24: negotiations on the Iranian nuclear program are curtailed.

US Secretary of State Tony Blinken, not hiding his disappointment, reports that "Tehran was not serious about the negotiations on the nuclear deal."

The Europeans, who seem to have supported Iran to the last, are issuing a communiqué stating: "After careful study, we are disappointed and worried about the changes Iran proposed to the texts that were discussed during the six rounds of talks in Vienna."

So in one fell swoop Iran, the owner of the second place in the world in gas reserves and the fourth in oil reserves, again blocked the lifting of the oil embargo and the return to the global hydrocarbon market (Russia sends greetings, flowers and gratitude to the mullahs).

“The Iranian colleagues have provided a written amendment to the text we left off in June,” said Wang Qun, the Chinese envoy to Vienna, adding that the new changes left the parties far from resolving the problem.

"Even Russia and China are clearly disappointed with what Iran is doing or not doing in these negotiations," Tony Blinken told Reuters.

“So Iran has some very important decisions to make.”

But even not demanding compensation or a guarantee that the next US president will not withdraw from the deal (how can this be technically guaranteed? It's like demanding eternal life or resurrection in the church in exchange for a purchased candle) blocked the seventh round of negotiations.

Iran insists that the United States lift all sanctions, but at the same time its Iranian improved centrifuges (it seems, we are talking about the IR-6 and IR-8 centrifuges, which are ten times more productive than the IR-1 centrifuges) continued their work, raised the weapons-grade Uranus.

Is it beautiful?

Modesty is an Iranian middle name.

IR-6 centrifuges are already at the underground Fordow enrichment plant in the amount of 166 pieces and at an accelerated rate and volume enrich uranium in the amount necessary for the military program, and not for the peaceful atom.  

Let me also remind you that the nuclear escalation was launched by Tehran exactly a year ago with the victory of the Conservatives in the parliamentary elections.

On November 29, 2020, the Iranian parliament held an emergency and closed meeting, at which it ratified the law

.

For this, key ministers, including the Foreign Minister, as well as the Minister of Intelligence and the head of the Central Bank, gathered in parliament then.

And 232 out of 246 votes were adopted:

- renewal of 20% uranium enrichment;

- increased use of IR-6 and IR-8 centrifuges;

- limitation of IAEA inspections;

- return of the 40 MW heavy water reactor in Arak to the state prior to the JCPOA.

The very name of the bill suggests that it has nothing to do with the peaceful atomic program.

These are “measures to lift sanctions,” in other words, nuclear blackmail.

On December 1, 2020, in the midst of a serious internal economic crisis and "nuclear expansion," the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, Ali Akbar Salehi, in an interview with the "reformist" newspaper Entekhab, said literally the following: “I wonder how the Guard Council generally adopted this law. In principle, we have such an opportunity - we are building centrifuges. But who will pay for it? They either don't know the cost of each IR-6 centrifuge, or they don't know how much internal resources we have. "

Six months later, the most influential heavyweight Salehi, a political peer of the Islamic Republic, ceased to be the head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran: it turned out that he did not know how many internal resources in the personal funds (boniads) of the spiritual leader, and that he did not understand in time that neither The IRGC, not the Guardian Council, and Khamenei himself is behind the initiative of the nuclear race, during which uranium has passed 60% from the 20% enrichment level.

“We will not accept the status quo when Iran is building its nuclear program, on the one hand, and dragging out time, on the other,” US Secretary of State Tony Blinken warned on December 2 in the evening.

On the morning of December 4, the Iranian national currency instantly reacted to the failure of the nuclear talks in Vienna with a catastrophic fall, and in the evening, at about 20:15 Iranian time, an explosion occurred in Natanz.

Versions of what happened are fundamentally different.

Official

: the commander of the air defense of the nuclear facility in Natanz said that they themselves fired a missile as part of a test in order to assess the speed of the air defense system's reaction to a possible attack from Israel, and that the missile exploded in the sky under the control of the Iranian air defense.

Iranian media now indicating that Iran was conducting a test with its air defense systems near Natanz, likely the Tor-M1 which Iran purchased from Russia (same system which shot down UA-752)

Good background on the Tor-M1 by @ RALee85https: / /t.co/NJHuvvcmC3https://t.co/p5KCrITCmp

- Nicole Grajewski (@NicoleGrajewski) December 4, 2021

Official Iranian non-military

: Governor Natanz said that "the cause of the explosion in Natanz is still unknown, the military is investigating the cause, the results will be published on Sunday."

Unofficial

: Israeli attack on the Natanz nuclear facility.

When the Iranians began to prove that these were their exercises, "an independent resource for the analysis of geopolitical and geostrategic events" ELINT News (apparently owned by the CIA and / or MI6) published satellite data showing that at the time of the "exercises" a passenger liner flew over Natanz , and recalled the shot down by the Iranian air defense of a civilian Ukrainian liner in January 2020.

"It's hard to believe this was a form of a planned test due to the clear evidence that there was a civilian airliner nearby."

Al-Monitor writes that Israeli intelligence has 90% enrichment data and is preparing for a potential war against Iran.

And (is it a coincidence?) Next week, not only the Israeli Defense Minister, but also the head of the Mossad, David Barnea, will go to Washington.

• © al-monitor.com

Even if we take as a working version that the rocket launched in the skies over Natanz was Iranian and this is actually a test, according to the Nour News agency, close to the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) of Iran, we can draw the following conclusions.

Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is ready to defend his nuclear program (it is already clear that it is hardly peaceful) by any means, not excluding the possibility of a war with Israel and not paying attention to possible civilian casualties over the Iranian sky.

And in general for any sacrifice.

An attempt to break through the Israeli "Iron Dome" and the search for vulnerabilities in the Israeli air defense system in May 2021, disruption of the Vienna talks by putting forward unrealizable demands in advance, now "exercises" or repelling an attack in the sky over the nuclear facility in Natanz (and it is not known which of this worse) - everything tells us that the world is extremely fragile and vulnerable.

Is the nuclear race (and the fact that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will logically follow Iran with nuclear claims - why not, as they say) to put the country's economy and its social stability at stake, not to mention the risk of war ?

An Islamic Iranian court is still sentencing protesters in November 2019 to death, and those arrested during the summer protests in Khuzestan and taking place right now in Isfahan are in line.

Abbas Daris, who was arrested by the Islamic Republic during November 2019 protests, has been sentenced to death.

He survived shootings of security agents in Mahshar, Khuzestan but now, like some other protesters, is condemned to death.

Lack of action by the international ... 👇 pic.twitter.com/3iaMTfR3Zc

- Masih Alinejad 🏳️ (@AlinejadMasih) December 4, 2021

To me personally, the cost of a nuclear race seems unjustified, and the risks are too high.

After all, Iran is reliably protected by its coolest missile program, it has a bunch of proxies in the region that provide problems to many neighboring countries, and Tehran feels safe in this "belt of controlled instability."

What is this obsession with a nuclear bomb?

Imagine my surprise when I realized that the nuclear masterminds of Iranian mullahs live not only in Iran. On the Twitter account of an influential adviser to the Iranian leader (he accompanied both the former Iranian delegation before the deal in 2015 and the current one in Vienna) Mohammad Marandi, the son of Ayatollah Khamenei's personal physician and professor of English literature at the University of Tehran, I found an article by Briton Peter Oborn , which he cites as an example and to which he refers, - "Could the negotiations in Vienna herald the beginning of a new cold war." I read it to understand who the supreme leader of Iran listens to.

Oborn, the golden pen of British journalism, was named Political Commentator of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2013, resigned from his post as chief political observer for The Daily Telegraph in 2015 and now writes inspiring (including mullahs) books.

The last of which is attacks on Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, and the first is the defense of a nuclear Iran.

China has swung its weight behind Iran, meaning the nuclear talks are not really about Iran.

They

concern the shape of the new world order emerging in the aftermath of US defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan.

My report from Vienna for Middle East Eye.

https://t.co/EAkDRWUcZ3

- Peter Oborne (@OborneTweets) December 3, 2021

Oborn in his article convinces that China, contrary to the opinion of Tony Blinken, supports Iran in the nuclear battle against the United States.

And that these talks in Vienna - they are actually not even about Iran, but about a new world order that emerged after the "humiliating defeat of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Oh well.

“Yesterday in Vienna, a new cold war was born between the United States and the Chinese superpower, shaping a new architecture of global security involving all the countries participating in the negotiations: France, Russia, Britain, Germany, China, Iran and the United States,” he writes.

And, including Charles Dickens, he adds: “The United States is not in the negotiating room today because Iran refused to do so.

However, an American delegation is in Vienna and took refuge in a nearby Marriott hotel.

European messengers are crossing the drafts and empty streets of Vienna to deliver messages to the American diplomats stranded there. "

Oborn was so carried away by the description of everyday life of the horrors of the unfortunate American diplomats, who are chilled by the Viennese icy draft in anticipation of secret messengers with dispatches that he forgot a little about the existence of smartphones, gadgets, the Internet and, in fact, about the 21st century.

However, knowing the mentality of the Iranian leaders, I am sure that such texts suit them with a bang.

80-year-old mullahs in Mashhad and Qom rejoice at the failure of the Vienna talks today, they say: “The Americans have begged us so much, and we have begged them!

We are cool!"

The Chinese brother spoke up in defense of Iran - however, only the voice of his Chinese ambassador to Iran, the overactive Mr. Chang Hua, who gave an interview to the Iranian edition of Mehr: "The United States must lift all sanctions against Iran!"

He is a trifle, but Iran is pleased.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry, let alone Chinese leader Xi, cleverly kept silent.

• © mehrnews.com

Meanwhile, Britain, whose golden feathers incite Iran to fight the United States and Israel, entered into a strategic anti-Chinese alliance with the United States and Australia (hello to Anglo-Saxon unity!), And a team of 40 Iranian negotiators left Vienna empty-handed.

One British pound is worth $ 1.32 and one Iranian rial is $ 0.0000236686.

The British have received from the Americans a contract for nuclear Australian submarines, which the French have defeated, and the Iranians are rehearsing an Israeli invasion - or fighting off Israeli attacks directly over their nuclear Natanz, whichever suits best.

All sanctions and embargoes imposed by Trump on Iran remain in place.

But another thing is also true: the clock is ticking, the centrifuges are spinning, the uranium is enriched.

The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.