As US President Barack Obama faces pressure to back up his year-end ultimatum for diplomatic progress with Iran, the administration says that domestic unrest and signs of unexpected trouble in Tehran’s nuclear program make its leaders particularly vulnerable to strong and immediate new sanctions.
The long-discussed sanctions would initiate the latest phase in a strategy to force Iran to comply with UN demands to halt production of nuclear fuel.
It comes as the Obama administration has completed a fresh review of Iran’s nuclear progress.
In interviews, Obama’s strategists said that while Iran’s top political and military leaders remained determined to develop nuclear weapons, they were distracted by turmoil in the streets and political infighting, and that the drive to produce nuclear fuel appeared to have faltered in recent months.
The White House wants to focus the new sanctions on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the military force believed to run the nuclear weapons effort.
That force has also played a crucial role in the repression of anti-government demonstrators since the disputed presidential election in June.
Although repeated rounds of sanctions over many years have not dissuaded Iran from pursuing nuclear technology, an administration official involved in the Iran policy said the hope was that the current troubles “give us a window to impose the first sanctions that may make the Iranians think the nuclear program isn’t worth the price tag.”
While outsiders have a limited view of Iran’s nuclear program, Obama administration officials said they believed that the bomb-development effort was seriously hampered by the exposure three months ago of the country’s secret enrichment plant under construction near the holy city of Qom.
The discovery, they argued, deprived Iran of its best chance of covertly producing the highly enriched uranium needed to make fuel for nuclear weapons.
In addition, international nuclear inspectors report that at Iran’s plant in Natanz, where thousands of centrifuges spin to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel, the number of the machines that are currently operating has dropped by 20 percent since the summer, a decline nuclear experts attribute to technical problems.
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