VIENNA — Iran has acted to cut its most sensitive nuclear stockpile by nearly 75 percent in implementing a landmark pact with world powers, but a planned facility it will need to fulfill the six-month deal has been delayed, a U.N. report showed on Thursday.
The monthly update by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has a pivotal role in verifying that Iran is living up to its part of the accord, made clear that Iran so far is undertaking the agreed steps to curb its nuclear program.
It is gradually gaining access to some previously blocked overseas funds. In Washington, the State Department said the United States has taken steps to release a $450 million installment of frozen Iranian funds as a result of the issuance of the report.
In addition, Japan has made two more payments totalling $1 billion to Iran for crude imports, two sources with knowledge of the transactions said.
Under the breakthrough agreement that took effect on Jan. 20, Iran halted some aspects of its nuclear program in exchange for a limited easing of international sanctions that have laid low the major oil producer's economy.
It was designed to buy time for negotiations on a final, long-term settlement of the decade-old dispute over nuclear activities that Iran says are peaceful but the West says may be covertly directed toward developing an atomic bomb capability.
Those talks — made possible by the election last year of a pragmatist, Hassan Rouhani, as Iranian president after years of confrontation with the West under his hardline predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — got under way in February and are aimed at reaching an agreement by July 20. Washington has not ruled out military action against Iran if diplomacy were to fail.
The IAEA update showed that Iran had — as stipulated by the Nov. 24 agreement with the United States, France, Germany, Britain, China and Russia — diluted half of its higher-grade enriched uranium reserve to a fissile content less prone to bomb proliferation. One of the payments from Japan, of $450 million on April 15, hinged on Iran meeting this target.
Tehran has continued to convert the other half of its stock of uranium gas refined to a 20 percent fissile purity — a relatively short technical step from 90 percent weapons-grade material — into oxide for making reactor fuel.
