International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Rafael Grossi said on Tuesday that his agency does not know the whereabouts of Iran’s enriched uranium stash, which could include up to 900 pounds of near-weapons-grade material.
Three days before the U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, Grossi said Iran was building a vast new enrichment complex at Isfahan. Much of Iran’s existing stockpile could have been transferred there, although he said it was impossible to know for certain without on-site inspections.
“There was an announcement, quite coincidentally, on the eve of the start of the military operation by Israel of a new enrichment facility in Isfahan, precisely, that we were going to be inspecting immediately,” Grossi said last Thursday, “but this inspection had to be postponed, we hope, because of the start of the military operation.”
Grossi told reporters last week that his inspectors last saw Iran’s uranium stockpile divided into storage casks that were small enough to fit in the trunks of ten cars and stored at a facility in Isfahan, but that was a week before Israel began its strikes on the Iranian nuclear program last Thursday.
Fox News host Martha MacCallum asked Grossi about his earlier statements in an interview on Tuesday.
“I have to be very precise, Martha,” he replied. “We are the IAEA, so we are not speculating here. We do not have information of the whereabouts of this material.”
Grossi told MacCallum that Iranian officials have told him the uranium stockpile is safe and being protected from further Israeli or U.S. action, possibly by moving it between different locations.
The IAEA director said the only way to determine the true status of Iran’s uranium hoard is for inspections to allowed to “resume as soon as possible.”
Grossi added that Vice President JD Vance was fundamentally correct in saying that Iran’s 60 percent enriched uranium is no longer an immediate nuclear weapons threat if Iran’s centrifuge facilities have been destroyed, because they would lack the ability to complete the refining process to produce 90-percent pure weapons-grade material.
“I wouldn’t argue with that because 60% is not 90%,” he said. “My obligation is to account for every gram of uranium that exists in Iran and in any other country.”
As both Vance and the IAEA have noted, 60 percent enrichment is far beyond any conceivable civilian use for uranium, and it is only one step away from weapons-grade material. The final step can be taken fairly quickly with the advanced centrifuge equipment Iran spent years acquiring, which is why nuclear weapons experts spoke of short “breakout times” in the vicinity of two weeks for Iran to produce bomb material.
If those centrifuges are gone, as Israeli intelligence evidently believes, Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons has been set back for years, even if it still has 900 pounds of 60-percent uranium tucked away somewhere.
“The devastating U.S. strike on Fordow destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable,” the Israel Atomic Energy Commission said in a statement on Wednesday.
“We assess that the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, combined with Israeli strikes on other elements of Iran’s military nuclear program, have set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years,” the statement concluded.
Although there has been some speculation about the 16 cargo trucks seen parked at the Fordow facility in satellite photos taken before the massive U.S. airstrike, it is highly unlikely that Iran could have disassembled and moved the advanced uranium centrifuges out of the facility, since the equipment was extremely large, delicately interconnected, and buried deep underground.
Grossi said on Monday that the centrifuges at Fordow were “extremely vibration-sensitive,” so it is likely that America’s gigantic Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bombs inflicted “very significant damage” on the enrichment facility.
When Israel began bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, Grossi noted that the power supply for the Natanz enrichment facility had been “completely destroyed,” which might very well have taken out the centrifuges, because they could spin out of control and wreck themselves in the event of massive power surges or blackouts.
Grossi said on Monday that no matter how concerned Iran might be about its 60-percent uranium stockpile, it still has a duty under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) to inform the IAEA of the exact whereabouts of the material, and allow IAEA inspectors to examine it.
“Any transfer of nuclear material from a safeguarded facility to another location in Iran must be declared to the agency,” he stated.
The Iranian parliament began drafting legislation to withdraw from the NPT after Israel’s airstrikes began. On Wednesday, the parliament approved a bill to suspend all cooperation with the IAEA.
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