WASHINGTON — A senior Trump administration official said today that new US Iran sanctions designations targeting Iranians alleged to have been involved in sensitive defense research are part of a broader pressure campaign it hopes will eventually persuade Iran to come back to the negotiating table.
“For the last few months we have been going to a great deal of trouble to reimpose pressures upon Iran … in order to try to incentivize Iran making the right choice and in coming back to the table to ultimately agree to the kind of enduring and better, more comprehensive settlement,” a senior US administration official, speaking not for attribution, told journalists on a call hosted by the State and Treasury departments today.
His comments came in a call announcing the designation of 14 Iranian individuals and 17 entities that US officials said were partly identified from the archive of Iranian nuclear weapons research that Israeli intelligence allegedly obtained from Iran last year. Israeli officials have reported that the archive describes research Iran conducted into nuclear weapons prior to 2003-2004, when this research was suspended.
US officials said today that several individuals who had been involved with that shuttered research program continue to do sensitive defense research for Iran’s Organization of Defense Innovation and Research, better known by its Persian acronym SPND, and its subsidiaries. The new sanctions designations are intended in part to make SPND and its researchers “radioactive,” to disincentivize younger Iranian researchers from working for SPND or affiliates, the US officials said.
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