Madrid, 23 July 2022 (TDI): The Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Mariano Grossi gave statements on Iran’s nuclear programme.
Grossi told Spain’s El Pais newspaper in an interview published on July 22, 2022, “Iran’s nuclear programme is “galloping ahead” and the International Atomic Energy Agency has very limited visibility on what is happening.”
The Iran nuclear agreement is formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). In the 2015 agreement, it was decided that Iran will reduce its nuclear activities in return for lifting the economic sanctions on Iran.
However, President Trump withdrew the United States (US) from JCPOA in 2018 by claiming it was defective. He believed that deal failed to limit Iran’s missile programme and regional influence.
Trump reinstalled all the sanctions on Iran to limit its nuclear programme and its involvement in regional conflicts.
When the United States withdrew from the agreement in 2018, Director General, Grossi said that it might be a “fatal blow” to efforts to revive the agreement.
The 2015 agreement has also not been revived despite indirect talks between Iran and the US. Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said that the 2015 agreement was very close to reviving but Tehran wanted US guarantees to avoid getting “bitten twice.”
He said: “We have a ready text in front of us and we agree on more than 95 to 96% of its content, but there’s still an important flaw in this text: we need to get the full economic benefits of the agreement. We don’t want to be bitten twice.”
Also, Grossi told El Pais that: “The bottom line is that for almost five weeks I have had very limited visibility, with a nuclear programme that is galloping ahead.
Therefore, if there is an agreement, it is going to be very difficult for me to reconstruct the puzzle of this whole period of forced blindness.”
Along these lines, Grossi had said in June that “There was a window of just three to four weeks to restore at least some of the monitoring that was being scrapped before the IAEA lost the ability to piece together Iran’s most important nuclear activities.”
Moreover, IAEA Director General responded to a statement regarding a Reuters article claiming that Iran was accelerating its uranium enrichment by using advanced machinery at its secret Fordow reactor. He said, “The technical progress of the Iranian programme is steady.”
