VIENNA: UN inspectors monitoring Iran’s Fordow nuclear site confronted a major gap in their knowledge last year as they watched trucks carrying advanced uranium-enriching centrifuges roll into the facility dug into a mountain south of Tehran.
While Iran had notified the International Atomic Energy Agency that hundreds of extra IR-6 centrifuges would be installed at Fordow, the inspectors had no idea where the sophisticated machines had come from, an official familiar with the U.N. monitoring work told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
The episode encapsulated how the UN nuclear watchdog has lost track of some critical elements of Iran’s nuclear activities since US President Donald Trump ditched a 2015 deal that imposed strict restrictions and close IAEA supervision.
Key blind spots include not knowing how many centrifuges Iran possesses or where the machines and their parts are produced and stored, quarterly IAEA reports show.
The agency has also lost the ability to carry out snap inspections at locations not declared by Iran.
For any deal to succeed, though, those IAEA blind spots will need to be closed, according to more than a dozen people familiar with Iran’s atomic activities, including officials, diplomats and analysts.
“There are gaps in our knowledge of Iran’s nuclear programme that must be addressed in order to have a baseline understanding of its current scale and scope,” said Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group think-tank. agencies