According to the terms of the 2015 agreement, the Islamic Republic was required to remove the core, or calandria, of its Arak nuclear reactor and fill it with cement, thus preventing its further use. It would then be allowed to rebuild and redesign the reactor so that it could be used for research but could not easily produce weapons-grade plutonium. But in recent public statements, Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization, stated that these requirements had not been fulfilled. Michael Segall writes:

Salehi suggested that Iran would continue to “discover and mine” uranium . . . and continue with its activities at the heavy-water reactor in Arak. Iran has purchased new equipment for the facility and did not even fill in the core of the reactor with cement in January 2016 in accordance with the nuclear deal, because “if we had done that, there would not be a reactor.” . . .

On January 16, 2016, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Board of Governors released a report, . . . which confirmed that Iran had removed and “rendered inoperable” the Arak facility’s calandria. [But] during an interview [on Iranian television] on January 22, 2019, Salehi criticized claims by the conservative camp that Iran had completely sealed the core of the reactor. He claimed that images published [of the sealed reactor in 2016] were photoshopped, and Iran was never required by the agreement to seal the core of the reactor with concrete. . . . Salehi emphasized throughout the interview [the Iranian nuclear program’s] progress [despite] the implementation of the nuclear agreement. . . .

Salehi’s words follow his statement on January 15, 2019, that Iran is capable of increasing its percentage of uranium enrichment to 20 percent within three or four days.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.