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In a confidential letter to the 27 EU member states, portions of which were provided to Bloomberg News, the foreign ministers of Europe’s three largest economies criticized Iran for its lack of openness over its nuclear program and called for raising the cost to Iran’s leaders of refusing to abandon what the U.S., Europe and Israel say is a covert nuclear weapons program. Iran says its program is solely for civilian energy and medical research.

One senior European diplomat who called the existing sanctions unprecedented in their scale said the aim of new measures would be to bring Iran’s economy to its knees in a way that hurts the regime rather than the people.

Iran’s rial is already in a tailspin, dropping 18 percent on Oct. 1, reaching a record low of 35,000 to the dollar on the unofficial market, and losing more than half its value against the dollar in street trading in the past two months.