IAEA director urges board not to condemn Iran after nuclear compromise offer

IAEA Director-General Rafael Grossi recommended to the IAEA Board of Governors not to condemn Iran this coming Friday following the Islamic Republic's acceptance of a compromise offer on Wednesday, which it turns out he personally suggested. 

Iran has offered to freeze its 60% uranium enrichment process and to allow four new IAEA inspectors into the country if the Board foregoes condemning it this week.

Grossi is the executive officer who runs the daily operations of the IAEA nuclear inspections and meets directly with heads of state and foreign ministers, as he did in Tehran last week.

The IAEA Board is a group of diplomats from 35 countries who generally meet quarterly, make strategic policy decisions, and give directives to Grossi, who then decides how to implement the directives.

In addition, the IAEA General Conference meets annually and has a broader supervisory role over the Board and Grossi.

The Board is not bound by recommendations and, at press time, was expected to reject his suggestion, viewing Tehran's compromise as too little too late.

To date, Iran has already enriched around 180 kilograms of uranium up to the 60% level, only one level away from the 90% weaponized level. 

Depending on whether one estimates a nuclear weapon as possible from 25 or 40 kilograms (there are different views and also different size bombs), this means that the Islamic Republic already has enough enriched uranium if it decides to break out into a nuclear weapon, to develop between four and seven weapons.

In fact, this amount of uranium is likely what Iran planned to enrich under the clandestine AMAD military nuclear program it ran from 1999-2003, and which Mossad later exposed in 2018 when it seized Iran's nuclear secrets from a warehouse in Shirobad, Tehran.

Accordingly, its critics at the IAEA and beyond would say that the compromise is worthless, absent a commitment also to reduce the already enriched 60% uranium stock significantly.

Further, the Islamic Republic's offer to return four nuclear inspectors out of eight that it previously expelled, and its condition that none of the four be among the group of eight, is also viewed as a bad faith compromise by many IAEA critics of Iran.

The eight inspectors were expelled after they caught Iran enriching uranium up to 84% in one location in February 2023, the most significant violation of the nuclear limits on Iran to date.

Time is running out

In the broader context, the IAEA Board is frustrated that Iran ignored the condemnation against it this past June and that time is running out for diplomacy before the global sanctions "snapback" mechanism - which allows any member of the 2015 nuclear deal to unilaterally snapback all global sanctions on Tehran - expires around October 2025.

Once the snapback expires, what remains of the 2015 nuclear deal - which has been on life support since around 2018-2019 when the first Trump administration pulled out of the deal after Mossad exposed Iran's nuclear cover-up and when Tehran responded with more openly violating the deal - will essentially be gone.

This could leave Iran to break out into a nuclear weapon even more freely or put greater pressure on Israel or the US to strike Tehran's nuclear program.

Twice this year, including last month, Iran has massively attacked Israel, and the IDF has countered by striking key targets in the Islamic Republic, but to date, the air force has refrained from striking any key nuclear sites.