The United States has rejected Iran’s nine-step plan to end its uranium enrichment program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions, The New York Times reported on Thursday.
The Times quotes unidentified U.S. officials saying that the plan proposed by Iran during the UN General Assembly last month called for the step-by-step removal of economic sanctions in exchange for the suspension of uranium enrichment at the Fordo nuclear plant, one of Iran’s two nuclear sites.
U.S. officials reportedly rejected the deal, saying that once the sanctions were lifted, that deal would have allowed Iran to “restart the [enrichment] program in a nanosecond”, while it would take at least a year to ramp the sanctions back up to their current level.
The Iranian economy has been showing the effects of the sanctions, especially in the past week, with the Iranian national currency tumbling against the dollar and losing up to 40 percent of its value.
The economic instability led to protests in Tehran’s Great Bazaar on Wednesday, which led to clashes with security forces and a number of arrests.
