‘Deep concern’
ON Tuesday, the National Council of Resistance of Iran held a press conference to elaborate upon the latest disclosures from the International Atomic Energy Agency regarding undeclared prior nuclear activities in Iran.
On February 23, the IAEA issued its first report on presence of uranium particles at two sites that had not been previously identified as locations for nuclear enrichment or related activities. At the same time, the agency called attention to the persistent absence of a satisfying explanation for the earlier discovery of similar particles at a third undeclared site. On Monday, the agency’s Executive Director Rafael Grossi spoke before a meeting of the 35-member Board of Governors and expressed “deep concern” over the findings in the latest report, the publication of which closely coincided with Iran’s decision to withdraw from the Additional Protocol to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The Additional Protocol stipulated that IAEA inspectors would have access to suspect sites on short notice in the country where it was implemented. By reversing that implementation, the Iranian regime has potentially hampered monitoring efforts that critics of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal believed were already inadequate.
The host of Tuesday’s press conference, NCRI Foreign Affairs Committee member Ali Safavi, pointed to remarks that the NCRI’s President-elect Maryam Rajavi had delivered in July 2015, when those negotiations were drawing to a close. “Total implementation of the UN Security Council resolutions, in particular total halt of enrichment, accepting the Additional Protocol, and free and unhindered access of the IAEA inspectors to all suspected centers and facilities, are necessary in order for the regime to give up its drive to acquire nuclear weapons,” Mrs. Rajavi said while criticizing the emerging agreement for falling far short of this.
A key complaint about the content of the JCPOA was the inherent limits it placed on access for international inspectors. The IAEA’s privilege of snap inspections applied only to previously disclosed sites, thus excluding the three that the agency identified in its latest report as having been active years ago. Asked whether the NCRI’s information pointed to those sites being associated with currently-ongoing nuclear activity, Safavi emphasized that Iran’s longstanding efforts to conceal those sites are evidence that the regime has something significant to hide and should not have been trusted when negotiating the limits of access.
To its credit, the JCPOA included procedures for the IAEA to request access to sites that came under suspicion after the deal’s signing. But in practice, this allowed Iranian authorities to delay and obstruct that access for weeks, months, or as Safavi said of one of the newly-identified sites, for more than a year after the authorities realized that it had been exposed. Safavi explained that intelligence about the site in the city of Abadeh in Fars Province had first leaked in July 2019, but was not made available to inspectors until August 2020. In the meantime, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps reportedly razed the buildings at that site and initiated efforts to sanitize it.
Safavi also noted that this sanitization was noticeably similar to that which had been undertaken in 2004 and again in 2012 at two other sites that apparently had roles to play in the Iranian nuclear weapons program. In the first place, the regime received a request from the IAEA for inspection of the Shian-Lavizan site, but granted that request only after destroying onsite buildings and turning over the soil to depths as great as four meters, in an effort to conceal traces of nuclear material.