IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi said Sunday that the two sides had reached the temporary “technical understanding” following his trip to Iran, which had recently signaled plans to scale back cooperation with the global nuclear watchdog.
The interim deal reached Sunday would alleviate the impact of Iran pulling out of the additional protocol, Grossi said. “What we agreed to is something that is viable, it’s useful to bridge this gap that we are having now, salvages the situation now,” he said.
While the same number of international inspectors will remain in Iran, Grossi said, their access to nuclear facilities will be more limited and they will no longer be allowed to conduct last-minute “snap inspections.”
“This is not a replacement for what we used to have. This is a temporary solution that allows us to continue to give to the world assurances of what is going on there, in the hope that we can return to a fuller picture,” said Grossi.
IAEA monitors had been granted sweeping inspection rights as part of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), a landmark agreement that was intended to limit Iran’s nuclear program and prevent the country from developing nuclear weapons in exchange for sanctions relief. Iran has long held that its nuclear program is intended for peaceful purposes, despite skepticism from the international community.
The two sides had been at an impasse. Washington and Tehran previously insisted that the other must be the first to come back into compliance with the deal.
Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said that as the party that chose to leave the deal in the first place, the onus remains on the US.
“The United States need to establish its bona fides to come back to the nuclear deal,” Zarif said in an interview with CNN earlier this month. “The United States is not in the nuclear deal, and the United States is not in the nuclear deal because of its own decision to withdraw, without taking the routes that were available to it within the nuclear agreement.”
“Until we sit down and talk, nothing’s going to happen. It doesn’t mean that when we sit down and talk we’re going to succeed, but we do know that if we don’t take that step, the situation is just going to go from bad to worse,” a senior State Department official said.
Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, told CNN last week that US officials were particularly worried about Iran’s decision to refuse to cooperate with the IAEA and that the “first order of business here would be for the Iranians to take the decision to move further out of compliance, and then I do believe that there is a diplomatic pathway.”
“We’re at an early stage here,” Sullivan said. “It’s going to take work, it’s going to take hard-headed, clear-eyed diplomacy, and ultimately it’s going to take a decision by Iran that they are prepared to take the steps required to assure the world, and prove to the world, that their (nuclear) program is for exclusively peaceful purposes.”
https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/21/middleeast/iran-iaea-nuclear-deal-intl-hnk/index.html
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