Iran is forging ahead with plans to manufacture a sophisticated uranium fuel for a research reactor in Tehran. The government’s announcement last week, which specialists said was not wholly unexpected, represents a further breach of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and comes at a critical point in negotiations to reboot the pact before Iran’s hardline president-elect, Ebrahim Raisi, assumes power on 8 August.

“Iran is pursuing a strategy of brinkmanship,” says Andrea Stricker, a nonproliferation analyst at the nonprofit Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “It is using civil-use justifications as a pretext to brazenly advance its nuclear weapons–related knowledge.” Iran says the reactor will be used to produce medical isotopes.

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