A last-minute technical understanding with Iran over the weekend will preserve international record keeping about the country’s controversial nuclear program over the next three months, but little else, the head of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog said in a webcast Tuesday.
“We got a temporary, technical, bilateral understanding,” Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said in a webcast hosted by the Washington-based non-government group, the Nuclear Threat Institute. “It is limited in time and limited in, I would even say, in value.”
Iran this week planned to cease complying with an additional protocol it signed with the International Atomic Energy Agency that allows U.N. inspectors, among other things, to demand access to suspected nuclear sites in the Islamic republic. The IAEA has additional protocols with multiple non-nuclear-weapon countries.
For the few months that new technical understanding with Iran lasts, “we will know exactly what happened, exactly how many components were fabricated, exactly how much material was processed or treated or enriched and so on and so forth,” Rossi said.
There is a confidential technical annex to the deal, Rossi said, but he declined to say what it did or did not allow U.N. inspectors in Iran to see and do.
Grossi also said Tuesday that Iran has yet to satisfactorily explain why IAEA inspectors found uranium particles at old Irani nuclear sites, where such particles shouldn’t be. Rossi said he continued to press Iran on the issue and would report more about it next week during the IAEA Board of Governors spring meeting in Vienna.
Iran has bolstered its supplies of fissile and other material since the U.S. withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plant of Action, or the Iran deal in 2018. China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and Germany remain party to the deal, which essentially lifted U.S. sanctions on Tehran in exchange for limits on uranium enrichment and other activities.
Rossi’s comments Tuesday echoed the director general’s remarks to media earlier this week after his impromptu weekend trip to Iran. On Tuesday, Grossi said he made the trip to prevent the remaining nuclear powers to the Iran deal from “sleepwalking” into a situation where they would lose track of what Iran was doing now and therefore be unable to reverse those steps if the U.S. rejoins the nuclear deal.
The Joe Biden administration has expressed interest in returning to the deal, struck by the Barack Obama administration in 2015 and cancelled by the Donald Trump administration. However, Biden has declined to lift all the sanctions Trump reimposed and Iran has said it will not return to compliance unless Biden does.
Critics of the Iran deal say it gives Tehran a free hand to develop ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons and essentially rewards Iran for bad behavior in the region, including financing and training military groups and terrorist operatives.
