Iran Nuclear Crisis Escalates
Iran's nuclear file was referred to the UN Security Council in February 2006, opening a decade-long confrontation over a programme Tehran insisted was civilian. The crisis began in 2002, when an exiled opposition group revealed two undeclared facilities — a uranium enrichment plant at Natanz and a heavy water reactor at Arak. Neither was a violation in itself; the concealment of them from the IAEA, over eighteen years of undeclared activity, was. Iran suspended enrichment in 2003 under negotiation with Britain, France and Germany, and resumed conversion in 2005 after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's election, arguing that the Non-Proliferation Treaty guaranteed its right to the full fuel cycle and that no concrete benefit had been offered. The Security Council passed six resolutions between 2006 and 2010 demanding suspension and imposing progressively severe sanctions, joined by American and European measures that eventually cut Iranian banks off from the international payments system and halved its oil exports. Israel pressed repeatedly for military action. The Stuxnet worm, developed jointly by American and Israeli agencies, destroyed around a thousand centrifuges at Natanz around 2009–10, the first known case of a cyberweapon causing physical damage. Several Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated. None of it stopped the programme. Installed centrifuges rose from a few hundred in 2006 to roughly 19,000 by 2013, and the estimated breakout time fell to a few months. Secret talks in Oman from 2012 and Hassan Rouhani's election in 2013 produced the interim deal of November 2013 and the JCPOA in 2015. That agreement held for three years and was abandoned by Washington in 2018. The crisis has since resumed on worse terms than it began.
- Year: 2006 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
