WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - The United States will terminate the sanctions waiver provided to Iran's nuclear facility at Fordow in the wake of recent decision by the Iranian regime to resume uranium enrichment there.
The sanctions waiver will be lifted on December 15.
Announcing the decision at a news conference at the State Department headquarters, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said, 'the right amount of uranium enrichment for the world's largest state sponsor of terror is zero'.
Referring to President Hassan Rouhani's recent announcement that Iran will begin uranium enrichment activities at the Fordow facility, Pompeo said it is yet another clear attempt at nuclear extortion that will only deepen Iran's political and economic isolation from the world.
Iran originally constructed Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant (FFEP) as a fortified, underground bunker to conduct secret uranium enrichment work northeast of the Iranian city of Qom, at a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base.
Under the terms of the international nuclear agreement that Iran signed in 2015, the Fordow facility was supposed to stop enriching uranium and researching uranium enrichment for at least fifteen years.
Provoked by a number of punitive measures by the Trump administration, Iran earlier this year announced that it was withdrawing its commitment made in the multi-nation nuclear agreement not to enrich uranium.
Israeli company ImageSat published satellite photographs showing renewed construction and development at the Fordow facility.
On November 5 this year, Iranian Atomic Energy Organization chief Ali Akbar Salehi announced that Iran will enrich uranium to 5 percent at Fordow.
The U.S. State Secretary says there is no legitimate reason for Iran to resume enrichment at this previously clandestine site.
He called on Iran to reverse its activity there immediately.
Pompeo accused Iran's supreme leader of 'reverting to his tried-and-true method of using nuclear brinkmanship to extort the international community into accepting the regime's destabilizing activity'.
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