Washington : “Strong indications” showed that Iran’s test of a new precision-guided ballistic missile on Sunday violated a UN Security Council resolution, the White House said on Tuesday.
“We’ve got strong indications that those missile tests did violate UN Security Council resolutions that pertain to Iran’s ballistic missile activities,” said White House press secretary Josh Earnest during a daily press briefing, Xinhua reported.
He pledged the US will work with its world partners “to engage a strategy to try to disrupt continued progress of their ballistic missile programme”.
The US State Department was also “deeply concerned” by Iran’s ballistic missile test.
“We are going to raise…the incident at the UN and will continue to do this with any and all Iranian violations of the UN Security Council Resolutions,” State Department spokesperson Mark Toner told reporters.
Both the White house and the State Department, however, insisted that the incident does not violate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the international agreement on the nuclear programme of Iran signed in Vienna, Austria, in July.
“But, this is altogether separate from the nuclear agreement that Iran reached with the rest of the world,” Earnest said. “So we will be able to verify Iran’s compliance with the nuclear agreement, and if they don’t, there is a very specified set of response that can be implemented to respond to those violations.”
The P5+1 group, namely the US, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany, reached the comprehensive nuclear deal with Iran on July 14. The accord would provide sanctions relief for Iran in exchange for limits on its controversial nuclear programme.