Tabnak - In a latest sign of continuing its path of normalization, Iran’s nuclear program has attracted a new, serious international partner. While the US President is still insisting on his claims against the Iran deal, China has announced its readiness to redesign Arak nuclear reactor.
Iranian state media Press TV reports that Iranian and Chinese companies will sign the first commercial contracts to redesign the Arak heavy water nuclear reactor in central Iran in the weekend.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Lu Kang, told a daily news briefing on Thursday that the accords would be inked in Vienna on Sunday, with initial agreements having already been reached in Beijing.
He further described the contracts as an important part of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, dubbed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
China and the United States are joint heads of the working group on the Arak project, and progress has been smooth, Lu told, adding that "The signing of this contract will create good conditions for substantively starting the redesign project.”
It should be noted that the announcement comes as US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recently accused Iran of "alarming ongoing provocations" to destabilize countries in the Middle East as the Trump administration launched a review of its policy towards Tehran.
Tillerson said the review would not only look at Iran's compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal but also its behavior in the region which he claims undermined US interests in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon.
Moreover, US President Donald Trump said Thursday that Iran is "not living up to the spirit” of the nuclear deal struck under the Obama administration, warning that his team is analyzing it "very, very carefully.”
"They are doing a tremendous disservice to an agreement that was signed,” Fox News quoted Trump as saying. "They are not living up to the spirit of the agreement.”
Trump did not go into specifics, and left open the door to whether the administration might scrap, uphold or try to revise the Obama-era agreement. "We will see what happens,” he said.
However, observers and experts warn that since it was negotiated with Iran by six world powers — the United States, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany — any unilateral US withdrawal would create diplomatic chaos, especially if Washington were to impose new sanctions over the objections of the other signatories.
At the same time, reacting to the recent accusations of his American counterpart, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said in Twitter that "worn-out US accusations" could not "mask its admission of Iran's compliance" with the deal's requirements. He called on the US to change course and fulfill its own commitments.
Iran and the P5+1 countries — the United States, Britain, France, China and Russia plus Germany — signed the JCPOA on July 14, 2015 and started implementing it on January 16, 2016.
Under the agreement, limits were put on Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for, among other things, the removal of all nuclear-related bans against the Islamic Republic. The UN Security Council later unanimously endorsed a resolution that effectively turned the JCPOA into international law.
