Anyway. This means that Iran is stopping their nuclear weapons program. And it was China alone who achieved that. The West and US had nothing to do with it.
US neocons (Senile Joe included) must be mad right now.
And why should we think they stopped? They've been hiding it, why would they not continue to do so?
If someone is seeking conventional reactor rather than breeder reactor technologies, they are going to develop weapons regardless of what any one person or leader wants.
Too many evil people exist as a percentage of government to ever honestly develop a nuke plant that CAN have weaponization, without weaponizing it.
Period.
I don't see why this is even a thing countries seriously pretend about.
Either they react their waste to uselessness and inseparable radioactive muck, or they are making weapons.
That was probably true fifty years ago. But dual purpose reactors turned out to be shit for both purposes - they made tiny quantities of weapons grade materials at enormous cost, while generating pathetic amounts of electricity.
The fundamental problem for anyone who wants to get a reactor to make both electricity and weapons grade fissile materials, is
240Pu. If you leave your Uranium in the reactor for long enough to be economical as a power plant, the plutonium it makes is rendered useless for bombs because it contains too much
240Pu - even a little
240Pu in with the
239Pu makes your bombs unstable (not a characteristic anyone wants for their nuclear weapons), and the two isotopes are basically impossible to separate - getting
235U out of mostly
238U is hard enough, and the mass difference there is three times as great.
In a modern nuclear plant, it's bleeding bloody obvious to any qualified nuclear engineer whether a plant is designed for power generation or for making bombs; And converting a modern plant from one to the other is more costly than just building a new plant of the other type.
At the nation state level, it's easier and cheaper to make nuclear weapons than it is to generate electricity from fission; But neither is particularly difficult or expensive.
Only one nation in the world has had nuclear power generation
before testing their first nuclear bomb; All the nuclear weapons states except India have either developed nuclear power later, or not at all. And none of the nuclear power generating states except India have gone on to develop nuclear weapons that they didn't previously have. And even India didn't use her power plants to make weapons grade materials; They built specialist plants to do that, just like all the other countries with bombs did.
Nuclear power plants really aren't a proliferation risk. As the North Koreans have ably demonstrated, if a rogue state wants a nuclear weapon, they have zero need for a civilian nuclear power industry in order to pursue and attain that goal.
Any nation that had the capability to divert a useful quantity of weapons grade material from their civilian nuclear program to a weapons program would have a FAR easier time just building and operating a weapons only program. It would be easier to keep secret, cheaper, easier to build, and easier to run.
If Iran really wants a bomb, they could just buy one from Russia or North Korea anyway.