The head of the International Atomic Nuclear Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, said on Monday that the agency discovered three “undeclared nuclear sites” in Iran that the regime has never explained and actively “sought to sanitize.”
Grossi presented his quarterly report on Iran to the IAEA’s Board of Governor’s at a regular meeting in Vienna on Monday, following leaks of that report indicating that the United Nations’ top body on nuclear energy had serious concerns regarding Tehran’s illicit nuclear technology development. Iranian officials insist that the nation has a right to pursue peaceful nuclear development and that it would never build a nuclear weapon, but Tehran also insists on enriching uranium to levels entirely unnecessary for civilian uses.
The IAEA meeting follows months of negotiations between the Iranian government and the administration of President Donald Trump in pursuit of an agreement to replace the 2015 “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” (JCPOA), the nuclear deal brokered by former President Barack Obama. Grossi has been strongly critical of what remains of that deal after President Trump withdrew from it in 2018, citing Iran’s repeated violations of its provisions.
“Nobody applies it, nobody follows it,” Grossi lamented of the JCPOA a year ago, adding that it “exists only on paper and means nothing.”
Grossi emphasized in his address to the IAEA board on Monday that he supports the negotiation efforts currently underway, though they have produced no substantive agreement between Washington and Tehran.
“I will continue to support and encourage the U.S. and Iran to spare no effort and exercise wisdom and political courage to bring this to a successful conclusion,” Grossi asserted, promising, “The IAEA is playing an important, impartial part in addressing this difficult and delicate matter and will have an indispensable role in verifying any new agreement.”
Regarding the accusations against Iran directly, Grossi detailed that inspectors with the IAEA “found man-made uranium particles at each of three undeclared locations in Iran — at Varamin, Marivan, and Turquzabad — at which we conducted complementary access in 2019 and 2020.”
He noted that the IAEA has spent years asking for “explanations and clarifications” to no avail.
“Unfortunately, Iran has repeatedly either not answered, or not provided technically credible answers to, the Agency’s questions. It has also sought to sanitize the locations, which has impeded Agency verification activities,” he continued.
The lack of clarification, he concluded, leads IAEA officials to believe that the sites “were part of an undeclared structured nuclear program carried out by Iran until the early 2000s and that some activities used undeclared nuclear material.”
“Arising from this, the Agency also concludes that Iran did not declare nuclear material and nuclear-related activities at these three undeclared locations in Iran,” he added. “As a consequence of this, the Agency is not in a position to determine whether the related nuclear material is still outside of safeguards.”
Grossi said that Iran’s rapidly growing stash of enriched uranium was “of serious concern” not just due to the potential use that Iran may have for it, but for “proliferation” reasons, without elaborating.
“When you are the only country in the world that is doing something like this at a level, which is very close to the level that you need to have a nuclear explosive device, then [the IAEA] cannot ignore it,” he asserted.
Iranian state media reported on Grossi’s comments, but emphasized his point that enriching uranium on its own is not inherently illegal. The state-run Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) claimed that Grossi said, “Iran’s current stockpile of enriched uranium does not amount to the material needed for a nuclear weapon.”
Last week, reports surfaced citing an alleged leaked IAEA report — presumably the one presented in Vienna on Monday — stating that Iran actually did have enough enriched uranium for “about 10 nuclear weapons if further refined, making Iran the only non nuclear-armed state producing uranium at this level.”
“Iran has produced highly enriched uranium at a rate equivalent to roughly one nuclear weapon per month over the past three months, the report found,” the BBC relayed last week.
Uranium enrichment has been the most contentious point of disagreement between the United States and Iran during the five rounds of talks conducted between April and today. Iranian officials have repeatedly refused to accept any restrictions on its uranium enrichment, while their American counterparts have stated they would not sign any agreement that does not call for the complete end of the Iranian enrichment program.
“An enrichment program can never exist in the state of Iran ever again. That’s our red line. No enrichment,” President Trump’s special envoy for the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, told Breitbart News in May. “We believe that they cannot have enrichment, they cannot have centrifuges, they cannot have anything that allows them to build a weapon.”
“What is clear and probably needs no emphasis is that uranium enrichment, as an inseparable part of Iran’s peaceful nuclear energy, must definitely be maintained, and we will make no slightest compromise in this regard,” Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei, on the other hand, declared that same month.
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