US invokes ‘urgency’ on imposing Iran sanctions

The US again threatens Iran with fresh sanctions within “a matter of weeks” as Tehran has begun enriching uranium to 20 percent for its research reactor.

Pentagon Spokesman Geoff Morrell claimed on Tuesday that the Iranian nuclear issue was a matter of “urgency” and hence new sanctions were warranted as soon as possible.

Morrell reiterated that the US Defense Secretary Robert Gates wants sanctions to be imposed in “a matter of weeks, not months.”

“He thinks that we need it and that we can do it in that time,” he told reporters. “In all his meetings he discussed this sense of urgency.”

The US has been pushing Iran to accept a deal that demands Iran to send its low-enriched uranium abroad for further processing for Tehran’s nuclear research reactor, which runs on 20-percent enriched uranium for the production of medical isotopes.

Iran has called for the swap deal to take place on its own soil, arguing that if it ships out the bulk of its enriched uranium, as demanded by the UN-backed deal, there will be no guarantee that the fuel would eventually be delivered to the country, based on the past contractual violations by Western nuclear powers in their dealings with the Islamic Republic.

After the US insisted that Iran had to accept the deal in its original form, ignoring Iranian concerns over the lack of a guaranteed delivery of the refined fuel in the deal, Iran declared that the Tehran research reactor was running out of fuel and that it could no longer count on the IAEA or the nuclear powers to deliver the required fuel for the reactor that mainly serves nearly a million Iranian cancer patients.

Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said on Tuesday that Iran could not wait for Western countries to further “waste time” while some 850,000 cancer patients were in dire need of medicine.

Upon the order of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran on Tuesday began enriching uranium to a level of 20 percent at its Natanz enrichment facility to meet the demand.