US Secretary of State John Kerry yesterday mounted a furious counterattack against critics of the Iran nuclear deal, telling skeptical lawmakers it would be fantasy to think the US could simply “bomb away” Tehran’s atomic know-how.
Testifying before Congress for the first time since world powers reached the landmark accord with Iran last week, America’s top diplomat was confronted head-on by Republican accusations that Iranian negotiators had “fleeced” and “bamboozled” him.
The vitriolic exchanges on Capitol Hill reflected a hardening of positions as Congress opened a 60-day review of the deal considered crucial to its fate. US ally Israel has condemned it as a dire security threat.
Kerry insisted that critics of the deal, which curbs Iran’s nuclear program in return for sanctions relief, are pushing an unrealistic alternative that he dismissed as a “sort of unicorn arrangement involving Iran’s complete capitulation.”
“The fact is that Iran now has extensive experience with nuclear fuel cycle technology,” Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “We can’t bomb that knowledge away. Nor can we sanction that knowledge away.”
The fact is Iran now has extensive experience with nuclear technology
Kerry said that if Congress rejects the agreement reached in Vienna, “the result will be the US walking away from every one of the restrictions we have achieved and a great big green light for Iran to double the pace of its uranium enrichment.”
“We will have squandered the best chance we have to solve this problem through peaceful means,” he said.
The US, Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany and the European Union signed the deal with Iran. Washington suspects Tehran of having worked in the past to build nuclear weapons but Iran says its programme is peaceful.
Opening the hearing on a contentious note, the committee’s Republican chairman, Bob Corker, criticised Kerry for the terms he negotiated. “I believe that you’ve been fleeced,” he said although he later made it clear that he had not intended any personal offence to Kerry.