The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency warned Thursday that the “space for negotiation and diplomacy ... is getting smaller” over Iran's advancing atomic program 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 U.S. from the Islamic Republic's nuclear deal with world powers.
However, the remarks from both Grossi and his Iranian counterpart at a news conference suggested 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 program, and enriches uranium to up to 60% purity — near weapons-grade levels of 90%.
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 organized weapons program in 2003.
Speaking at a news conference with Mohammad Eslami of the Atomic Energy Organization 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. ”
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Associated Press writer Nasser Karimi in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.
