Did Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif insult the United States after the nuclear agreement was announced? White House press secretary Josh Earnest told Fox News he isn’t sure.
Zarif implied the Obama administration was being deceitful in the framework fact sheet it posted after talks with Iranian leadership.
“The solutions are good for all, as they stand,” Zarif tweeted. “There is no need to spin using ‘fact sheets’ so early on.”
“I don’t know if it was a shot at the United States or not, but the fact is he’s not contradicting any of the facts and any of the understandings that are included in that fact sheet,” Earnest said.
“He’s obviously out there trying to make the case to his population and to his country’s leadership that he got a good deal. We’re doing the same thing and the facts that are included in our fact sheet about shutting down every pathway they have to a nuclear weapon and putting in place the toughest inspections regime that’s ever been put in place.”
The Obama administration has not provided any answers to how inspectors could gain access to Islamic Republic’s if the regime refuses to allow the inspectors into the facilities similar to what North Korea did 10 years after agreeing to mandated nuclear inspections in a deal with the Clinton administration.
Fred Kaplan wrote in The Washington Monthly in 2002, “The North Koreans expelled the international inspectors, broke the locks on the fuel rods, loaded them onto a truck, and drove them to a nearby reprocessing facility, to be converted into bomb-grade plutonium.”
Earnest claimed that the administration is still “working out the details” in regards to the absence of snap inspections from the framework deal. Snap inspections would mean nuclear experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency could visit and examine Iran nuclear facilities without giving prior notice, but Earnest responded the inspections were still the toughest to ever be proposed against a country.
“They’re still working out these details, but this is the most intrusive inspections of any country’s nuclear program that have ever been put in place against a country,” he said. “What we’re talking about are the toughest inspections that have ever been put in place, so it’s not just nuclear facilities that will be put under inspection, it’s also reprocessing facilities for nuclear material.”
Earnest also claims the U.S. government would prevent Iran from producing nuclear grade material by taking “the plutonium reactor that currently exists in Iran, which is a very dangerous facility where you can build up substantial nuclear weapons grade material.”
“We would actually be destroying the core of that reactor — shipping the parts out of the country and ensure that when its being restocked, it’s being restocked with equipment that would not allow you to process plutonium at a weapons grade,” he said.