Iran to limit UN inspector access to nuclear sites

As President Joe Biden makes his opening moves to revive and build upon the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, Iran continued its pressure campaign on the West by saying it will now offer United Nation Inspectors less access to it's nuclear program. After arriving back from an emergency trip to Iran, Rafael Mariano Grossi, the Director-General of International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, said they reached an understanding with Tehran to continue to allow monitoring of its nuclear program for up to three months.

But Grossi's remarks to journalists underlined a narrowing window for the U.S. and others to reach terms with Iran, which is already enriching and stockpiling uranium at levels far beyond those allowed by its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers. Matthew Lee, a Diplomatic Writer for the Associated Press, does not think the situation has reached a "new crisis point yet", but also believes that things haven't gotten any better.

"You can make the case, I suppose, that it was not the worst-case scenario," Lee said. "The Iranians didn't completely withdraw and cut off all cooperation with the UN. But at the same time, the amount of access that the IAEA has now to Iran's nuclear sites is less than it was just a week ago before the Biden administration started making its overtures to the Iranians."

There are 18 nuclear facilities and nine other locations in Iran under IAEA safeguards. In 2018, then-President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. unilaterally out of the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, saying it needed to be renegotiated.

Even as Iran has backed away from restrictions of the deal since then to put pressure on the other signatories - Germany, France, Britain, Russia, and China to provide new economic incentives to offset U.S. sanctions, those countries have insisted it's critical to keep the deal alive so that inspectors are able to continue to verify Iran's nuclear activities.

"All of the sanctions that the Trump administration had reimposed remain in place," Lee said. "What the Biden administration has done, though, is to say, one, we are ready to come back to the table and negotiate. Number two, we have withdrawn the previous administration, the Trump administration's determination that Iran was insignificant nonperformance of its obligations under the nuclear deal and therefore all U.N. sanctions must be restored."

Already, Iran has slowly walked away from all the nuclear deal's limitations on its stockpile of uranium and has begun enriching up 20%, a technical step away from weapons-grade levels. It also has begun spinning advanced centrifuges barred by the deal, which saw Iran limit its program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Lee said both the U.S. and Iran argue the other side fell out of compliance with the landmark nuclear deal and is waiting to see which country takes the first big step.

"It's a little bit of who goes first here, who comes back into compliance first, what needs to be done," Lee said. "I think that's going to be a main point if and when this meeting ever happens."

An escalating series of incidents since Trump's withdrawal has threatened the wider Mideast. Over a year ago, a U.S. drone strike killed a top Iranian general, causing Tehran to later launch ballistic missiles that wounded dozens of American troops in Iraq. A mysterious explosion also struck Iran's Natanz nuclear facility, which Iran has described as sabotage. In November, Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who founded the country's military nuclear program some two decades earlier, was killed in an attack Tehran blames on Israel. 

(Image Credits: AP)