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Iran's High Card at the Nuclear Table as Negotiations Resume Today
(New York Times)- William J. Broad- The rising hostilities against Iran and its atomic complex - assassinations and cyberattacks, trade bans and oil embargoes, frozen assets and banking prohibitions - have clearly done much to bring Tehran back to negotiations, which are to resume Monday. But the drama has also tended to overshadow a central fact: the Iranians have managed to steadily increase their enrichment of uranium and are now raising their production of a concentrated form close to bomb grade. Ray Takeyh, an Iran specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, said a crisis never erupted because the Iranians made their moves so gradually. The international community, he noted, "gets acclimated." As if tensions weren't high enough, experts say that Tehran might raise the stakes further by re-enriching some of its growing supply of 20 percent uranium to even higher levels of purity.