The U.S. and Iran planned no meeting at deadline about whether to let Washington back in to the politically binding Iran nuclear deal, though U.N. inspectors did clinch a last-minute technical understanding with the Islamic Republic to preserve some record keeping about Tehran’s controversial nuclear program.
On Thursday, State Department spokesman Ned Price said the U.S. was willing meet with Iran and the other parties to the deal — China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and Germany — to discuss a potential return, but that Washington would not give Iran any relief from economic sanctions before coming to the table.
Iran’s foreign minister tweeted Thursday that Iran would not discuss a U.S. return to the deal, abandoned by the Donald Trump administration in 2018, unless Washington first lifts sanctions. The deal, or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was struck during the Barack Obama administration in 2015 and essentially suspended sanctions on Iran in exchange for limits on the country’s ability to produce fissile material.
After the U.S. withdrawal and the return of sanctions under Trump, Iran steadily ceased complying with the deal and started increasing its stockpile of fissile materials, to the extent that Iran could now acquire enough material to make a nuclear weapon in “a few months,” Price said Thursday.
Meanwhile, under a new Iranian law, Tehran this week planned cease complying with an additional protocol it signed with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that allowed 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.
Just before Iran’s new law took effect, the head of the IAEA, the U.N.’s nuclear agency, said he had reached a “technical understanding” with Iran that would preserve records about the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program over the next three months — but do but little else.
“We got a temporary, technical, bilateral understanding,” Rafael Grossi, director general of the IAEA said in a Tuesday 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.”
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 in Vienna during the scheduled IAEA Board of Governors spring meeting.
Rossi’s comments Tuesday echoed the director general’s remarks to media earlier in the week after his impromptu trip to Iran on Feb. 19-20. On Tuesday, Grossi said he made the trip to prevent the remaining parties 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 further noncompliance with the 2015 deal if the U.S. eventually rejoins the accord.
The Joe Biden administration has expressed interest in returning to the deal, and Price said Thursday that the pact, when it was in full force during the Obama administration, “was verifiably and permanently blocking Iran’s ability to acquire a nuclear weapon.”
Critics of the Iran deal might disagree with that and say that even if Iran acted in good faith and was not secretly violating the deal, Tehran would remain free under the agreement to develop ballistic missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons regionally and eventually globally, and that the agreement essentially rewarded Iran for bad behavior in the region, such as financing and training military groups and terrorist operatives.
