Between March 18-29 and May 13-24, Iran is scheduled to take the helm of the United Nations Conference on Disarmament despite being a state sponsor of terrorism.
Leading the conference rotates by alphabetical order among member states, and Iran is next on the list.
At the U.S. State Department, and its Bureau of Counterterrorism, Iran is listed alongside North Korea and Syria as a terror-funding nation.
Other countries set to lead the Conference on Disarmament later this year include India, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland and Israel.
Interestingly, the conference is the UN body responsible for negotiating nuclear disarmament treaties and other weapons agreements.
For Clare Lopez, a former CIA officer, it is “preposterous” that Iran is even a member of the organization, considering that the country’s regime has spent a few decades striving to gain “a deliverable nuclear weapons capability.”
A nuclear-capable Iran, she says, is a "danger to the rest of the world.”
According to a report released by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in November 2023, uranium particles enriched up to 83.7 percent were found in Iran’s underground Fordo nuclear site.
This discovery is “alarming,” says Lopez, explaining that anything over 20 percent is considered highly enriched.
“There has been little to no cooperation between the Iranian regime and the IAEA,” Lopez points out, adding that “Iran is also showing no real willingness to cooperate in the future—and this is very concerning.”
She warns that “at 80 percent, the Iranian regime is barely a hop, skip, and a jump from weapons grade uranium, which is above 90 percent—the ideal level of enrichment to make a nuclear device.”
Last week, the IAEA’s director general Rafael Grossi also admitted Iran has enough highly enriched uranium to build “several” nuclear weapons.
Clearly, Lopez notes, Iran has exhibited “a big leap” in nuclear weapons capability over the past couple decades.
“We know they have nuclear capable missiles," she tells AFN, "but what we don’t know is if they’ve attached any warheads to the nose cones of those missiles."
Iran has also been in the news because of the Israel-Hamas war now happening in Gaza. U.S. intelligence has not directly tied Iran to the Oct. 7 attack - at least not publicly - but it is unlikely Iran did not know Hamas was planning a huge, well-planned attack that depended on Iran's weapons and funding.
Iran is also being blamed by the Biden administration for the drone strike in Jordan that killed three U.S. servicemembers. An Iraqi-based terrorist group, funded by Iran, has said it carried out the attack.
"I do hold them responsible," President Biden said of Iran this week, "in the sense that they're supplying the weapons to the people who did it."
