"If we wanted to build a nuclear weapon we could have done it some time ago," Zarif told Christiane Amanpour. "But we decided that nuclear weapons are not, would not augment our security and are in contradiction to our, eh, ideological views. And that is why we never pursued nuclear weapons."
On Monday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken told NBC that if Iran violated additional restrictions included in the 2015 nuclear deal it could obtain enough fissionable material for a bomb within "a matter of weeks".
Zarif said that the uranium enriched by the Islamic Republic could immediately be scaled back to comply with the nuclear deal if the US lifts sanctions. "Eight thousand pounds of enriched uranium can go back to the previous amount in less than a day,” he claimed.
The Biden administration, the Iranian foreign minister said, had a "limited window of opportunity" to re-enter the 2015 nuclear agreement.
"The time for the United States to come back to the nuclear agreement is not unlimited," he said. "The United States has a limited window of opportunity, because President Biden does not want to portray himself as trying to take advantage of the failed policies of the former Trump administration."
Zarif sketched out the path to overcome the impasse saying the EU foreign policy chief could "choreograph" the moves.
"There can be a mechanism to basically either synchronize it or coordinate what can be done," Zarif told CNN when asked in an interview how to bridge the gap between Washington and Tehran. Each government wants the other to resume compliance first.
Zarif noted the agreement created a Joint Commission coordinated by the European Union foreign policy chief, now Josep Borrell. Borrell "can ... sort of choreograph the actions that are needed to be taken by the United States and the actions that are needed to be taken by Iran," Zarif told CNN.
The Commission includes Iran and the six other parties to the deal that were Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States.
