TEHRAN – U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has acknowledged “that’s right” that Iran has made a lot progress in nuclear industry both in terms of “material” and “knowledge” since the Trump administration quit the nuclear deal, officially called the JCPOA, in May 2018.

Talking to CBS News on “Face the Nation” program on Sunday, Blinken said after the U.S. pulled out of the nuclear deal Iran began to “ignore the constraints that the deal had imposed on” its nuclear program.

Iran began to gradually remove bans on its nuclear work exactly one year after Trump withdrew the U.S. from the JCPOA and introduced the harshest sanctions on Iran. Even at the time Iran announced if the European parties to the pact compensate Iran for the sanctions, the Islamic Republic will reverse its decision.

Blinken said Iran “has been galloping forward and it's enriching more material. It's enriching at- at higher levels- degrees than were allowed under the agreement… it is gaining knowledge. And if this goes on a lot longer, if they continue to gallop ahead… they're going to have knowledge that's going to be very hard to reverse, which I think puts some urgency in seeing if we can put the nuclear problem back in the box that the agreement had put it in and, unfortunately, Iran is now out of as a result of us pulling out of the agreement.”

Late last year the Iranian parliament approved a legislation that obligated the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) to limit the International Atomic Energy Agency’s access to the Iranian nuclear sites, install advanced centrifuges and enrich uranium to 20 percent if the U.S. doesn’t lift illegal sanctions against Iran.

The JCPOA has limited Iran’s nuclear enrichment to 3.67 percent.

However, Iran has announced that it will reverse its nuclear decision if the U.S. fully lifts the sanctions in a verifiable way.

PA/PA