Arab News
VIENNA/JEDDAH: The head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog is flying to Tehran for crisis talks on Sunday as the push for a new deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program faces collapse.
Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), will meet Mohammad Eslami, new head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, ahead of next week’s meeting of the IAEA’s 35-nation board of governors.
The agency told member states last week that Iran had still failed to explain uranium traces found at several undeclared nuclear sites, and the IAEA required urgent access to monitoring equipment to keep track of parts of Iran’s nuclear program.
Pressure is mounting for a formal rebuke of Iran for stonewalling the agency, which would almost certainly mean the end of currently stalled talks in Vienna aimed at reviving the original 2015 nuclear deal.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said: “I hope the board of governors, under the influence of certain pressures, will not take any action that would destroy the process of customary cooperation between Iran and the agency.”
Separate, indirect talks between the United States and Iran on both returning to compliance with the nuclear deal have been halted since June. Washington and its European allies have been urging hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi’s administration, which took office in August, to return to the talks.
Under the 2015 deal between Iran and major powers, Tehran agreed to restrictions on its nuclear activities in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions against it.
President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the deal in 2018, re-introducing painful economic sanctions. Iran responded as of 2019 by breaching many of the deal’s core restrictions, like enriching uranium to a higher purity, closer to that suitable for use in nuclear weapons.
Western powers must decide whether to push for a resolution criticizing Iran and raising pressure on it for stonewalling the IAEA at next week’s meeting of the agency’s 35-nation Board of Governors. A resolution could jeopardize the resumption of talks on the Iran nuclear deal as Tehran bristles at such moves.
The US is now close to abandoning its efforts to revive the deal, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week.
(With Reuters)
