Head of UN nuclear watchdog visits Iran

Dubai: The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency warned on Thursday that the “space for negotiation and diplomacy ... is getting smaller” over Iran’s advancing atomic programme as wars in the Mideast rage on and as President Donald Trump will return to the White House.

Rafael Mariano Grossi of the IAEA was visiting Tehran in an effort to restore his inspectors’ access to Iran’s program and answer still-outstanding questions over it as he has on previous trips with limited success since Trump unilaterally withdrew the US from the Islamic Republic’s nuclear deal with world powers.

However, the remarks from both Grossi and his Iranian counterpart at a news conference sufggested sizeable gaps still exist, even as some countries are pushing to take action against Iran at an upcoming IAEA Board of Governors’ meeting.

“We know that it is indispensable to get, at this point of time, to get some concrete, tangible and visible results that will indicate that this joint work is improving (the) situation, is bringing clarification to things and in a general sense it is moving us away from conflict and ultimately war,” Grossi said.

Since the deal’s collapse in 2018, Iran has abandoned all limits on its programme, and enriches uranium to up to 60 per cent purity — near weapons-grade levels of 90 per cent.

Surveillance cameras installed by the IAEA have been disrupted, while Iran has barred some of the Vienna-based agency’s most experienced inspectors. Iranian officials also have increasingly threatened that they could pursue atomic weapons, something the West and the IAEA has been worried about for years since Tehran abandoned an organised weapons programme in 2003. Speaking at a news conference with Mohammad Eslami of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, Grossi stressed that while the IAEA and Iran continued to negotiate, time was not necessarily on their side.

“The fact that international tensions and regional tensions do exist — this shows that the space for negotiation and diplomacy is not getting bigger, it is getting smaller,” Grossi said. Before appearing with Eslami, Grossi met with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who later wrote on the social platform X that “differences can be resolved through cooperation and dialogue”.

However, he warned Tehran was “NOT ready to negotiate under pressure and intimidation.” Some politicians have even suggested Iran abandon the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, known as the NPT, and pursue the bomb.