On Monday (April 12), Iran accused Israel of sabotaging its key Natanz nuclear facility and vowed to retaliate for the attack. In response to the incident, the White House said the U.S. had no role in it.
Nournews, Iran’s semi-official website, said the person who caused a power outage at a production hall at the underground uranium enrichment plant at Natanz has been identified, noting that authorities are searching for that person. Information about the person was not made public.
On Sunday (April 11), the Iranian government confirmed that an accident occurred at the facility in question the day after new uranium enrichment centrifuges were started at the country’s nuclear power plant, suggesting that its facilities were targeted.
In response, the White House said in a statement Monday that the U.S. was not involved in any attack on Iran’s critical Natanz nuclear facility and would not comment on speculation about the cause of the incident.
Iran and the U.S. have been engaged in a series of diplomatic exchanges since today to revive the 2015 nuclear deal, and last week Iran and several countries held “constructive” talks to salvage the deal. The announcement came after the Trump administration said it was withdrawing from the deal because it failed to rein in Iran’s nuclear research and development moves and also provided Iran with significant funding, leading to a breakdown in the multinational consensus reached under the Obama administration.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Monday put the issue in clear condemnation of Israel, saying on state television that “the Zionists want to retaliate because we have made progress in the way of lifting sanctions …… We will not fall into their trap …… We will not allow such sabotage to affect the nuclear negotiations.” He said he would retaliate against “the Zionists.”
Several Israeli media quoted unnamed intelligence sources as saying that the country’s Mossad spy service had carried out a successful sabotage operation at the underground Natanz facility that could set back uranium enrichment there for months.
Iran’s nuclear energy chief Ali Akbar Salehi said an emergency power system has been activated at Natanz to offset the impact of the outage. “Uranium enrichment work at the site has not stopped.”
Iranian authorities described the incident at the nuclear facility a day earlier as an act of “nuclear terrorism” and said Tehran reserved the right to take action against the perpetrators.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh told a news conference that “all the centrifuges that broke down at the Natanz site were of the IR-1 type.” He was referring to Iran’s first generation of enrichment machines. “Our nuclear experts are assessing the damage, but I can assure you that Iran will replace the damaged uranium enrichment centrifuges at Natanz with advanced centrifuges.”
Modern centrifuges can refine uranium to higher fission purity at a faster rate, helping to build up reserves that could shorten Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon if it chooses to develop one.
The 2015 deal only allows Iran to use up to 5,060 IR-1 machines for enrichment in a plant designed to hold about 50,000 IR-1 machines, but Iran has already begun using hundreds of advanced centrifuges, including IR-2m, for enrichment at Natanz.
Despite strong Israeli opposition, U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has pledged that countries will rejoin the deal if Iran returns to full compliance with nuclear fuel production limits.
Asked by reporters about the Natanz blackout, a German Foreign Ministry spokesman hinted at a warning that such events could adversely affect nuclear talks.
Khatibzadeh said nuclear talks would resume in Vienna on Wednesday (April 14). Delegates said on Friday (April 9) that diplomatic progress had been made. Iran insists that the U.S. must first lift all sanctions that have crippled its oil economy before it can stop accelerating enrichment and resume the enrichment process to its ceiling.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday that Iran has never given up its efforts to develop nuclear weapons and that Israel would never allow Tehran to do so. Israel considers Iran’s uranium enrichment activities to be a great threat.
Tehran has blamed Israel for the occasional sabotage and shutdown of Iran’s nuclear facilities for more than a decade.
In 2010, the Stuxnet computer virus, widely believed to have been developed by the United States and Israel, was used to attack Natanz, causing a devastating failure of the centrifuge cascade that refines uranium.
Last July, a fire broke out at Natanz, which Iran said was an Israeli attempt to sabotage uranium enrichment activities there.
Iran has also accused Israel of being responsible for the ambush killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh outside Tehran last November, who is believed by Western intelligence to be the mastermind of Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement in the incident.
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