'Russia Deepening An Alliance With Iran Is Something The World Should Look And See As Profound Threat'

Nuclear Deal Increasingly Unlikely As Iran Strengthens Ties With Russia

 Simon Watkins of OilPrice.com

It is true that the European Union (EU) last week tabled a ‘final text’ of a new iteration of the nuclear deal – the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – to Washington and Tehran. However, it is equally true, as conveyed at length and exclusively to OilPrice.comlast week by several senior political and oil industry sources close to proceedings, that there is virtually no chance of such a deal being done without a massive concession coming from Iran that it is impossible to see the current regime making.

“Nothing has changed in the past few months from when the U.S. decided that Iran was just trying to buy time for its nuclear weapons development program by continuing to submit new clauses to the text of the new version of the JCPOA agreement,” a senior energy source who worked closely with Iran’s Petroleum Ministry, told OilPrice.com.

“And Washington has told everyone else in the P5+1 group [the U.S., the U.K., France, China, and Russia ‘plus’ Germany] that it will not budge from its position on the IRGC, which is aimed – as Iran knows – at destroying the IRGC’s influence, and by extension Iran’s influence – in the world,” he said.

A cementing of the U.S. view that “we are not going to change a single word or add a single comma in the current draft [of the new version of the JCPOA] on the table” – as a senior European Union energy source told OilPrice.com last week - came on 9 August with the launch of Iran’s ‘Khayyam’ satellite, built almost entirely by Russia and powered into orbit from the Russia-controlled Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. 

According to Iran, the satellite will be “used to monitor Iran’s borders and improve the country’s capabilities in management and planning in the fields of agriculture, natural resources, environment, mining, and natural disasters.” 

According to the U.S., the satellite is to be used for spying on its neighbors. 

Neither statement is entirely true, although the U.S. did hint at how serious it is when a State Department spokesman said last week of the Khayyam launch: “Russia deepening an alliance with Iran is something that the whole world should look at and see as a profound threat.”

What the Khayyam satellite was launched for is to provide the final piece of the missile guidance systems that Russia and Iran have been working on for years – this one relating to improving the accuracy of missiles (by up to 25 percent for short- and medium-range missiles and by up to 70 percent for long-range missiles) according to the Iranian source.

During those past few years, Iran has sent several very small (50 kilograms or less) satellites of its own making into orbit, although none of them had the relative operational sophistication of the Russian-made Khayyam satellite (which weighs over half a tonne) launched last week.

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