Chris Coons: “I wish to thank my colleague from Connecticut for his active leadership role on the Foreign Relations Committee and his…”

“I wish to thank my colleague from Connecticut for his active leadership role on the Foreign Relations Committee and his deep interest in this topic. By way of transition to my colleague from Pennsylvania, I briefly want to point out this picture of the Arak heavy water reactor in Iran. To me, it is a symbol of both what implementation day and the JCPOA letter promises positively and the unresolved risks it presents. Implementation day has only been reached because the IAEA--the International Atomic Energy Agency--certified to the world that Iran had taken the very core of this reactor, capable of producing weapons- grade plutonium, and filled it with concrete, rendering it useless for the production of significant quantities of plutonium. That is a significant step forward, but when a reporter asked me the other day: Does Iran still pose a nuclear threat to the United States and our vital ally Israel, I said: Of course. When asked why, I said because they still possess the knowledge, the resources, the engineering, the uranium in the ground, in the mines, in the mills of their country, and the engineers and the facilities to at some point enrich once again to weapons grade.…”