Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, speaking at a press conference in New York on Saturday, said: "Iran will vigorously resume the activities it halted under the 2015 nuclear agreement if the United States scraps the multilateral accord. The resumption of uranium enrichment would be Tehran's 'probable' response to a possible US withdrawal from the nuclear deal".
In further comments, Zarif said: "America should never have feared Iran producing a nuclear bomb, but we will pursue vigorously our nuclear enrichment".
Elsewhere in his remarks, Zarif urged European leaders to press Trump to abide by the JCPOA, stressing that offering concessions to the US president would prove futile.
He said: "To try to appease the president, I think, would be an exercise in futility".
A possible US withdrawal from the Iran deal would send a message to all governments "that you should never come to an agreement with the United States, because at the end of the day, the operating principle for the United States is, what's mine is mine, what's yours is negotiable," Zarif pointed out.
US President Donald Trump has been a vociferous critic of the Iran nuclear deal, which was negotiated under his predecessor, Barack Obama. He has called the agreement the “worst deal ever” and even threatened to tear it up.
In January, Trump decided to stick with the deal, but gave the European signatories a May 12 deadline to "fix the terrible flaws" of the accord or have him abandon it.
This is while the nuclear agreement, which is officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), is an international document and endorsed by the Security Council Resolution 2231.
