Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said on Monday that former President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran “exists only on paper and means nothing.”
“Nobody applies it, nobody follows it. There have been attempts to revive it here in Vienna. But unfortunately, although they were relatively close to success, they failed for reasons unknown to me, because I was not involved in the process,” Grossi complained to Russia’s Izvestia newspaper.
The 2015 nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was never submitted to Congress for ratification. Critics of the deal accused Iran of cheating from the start. Israeli intelligence obtained documents in 2018 that showed the Iranian government secretly violated its non-proliferation commitments under the agreement.
Former President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA in May 2018. Trump said it was clear that “we cannot prevent an Iranian nuclear bomb under the decaying and rotten structure of the current agreement.”
Iran was nominally still bound to its agreement with the European powers that signed the JCPOA, but Tehran has largely treated the agreement like a dead letter since Trump withdrew, and arguably for quite some time before that.
Even before the U.S. withdrawal, Iran complained that it did not receive the vast economic benefits it envisioned when international sanctions were lifted under the agreement. After U.S. sanctions snapped back into place, the regime in Tehran blamed all of its economic woes on the United States, and no concessions by the Europeans were good enough to bring the deal back to life.
Grossi told Izvestia that he finds it frustrating to deal with Iran, which has blocked IAEA inspectors from investigating key sites and refused to hand over documents demanded by the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
“I continue to tell my Iranian colleagues that we must provide the agency with at least minimal access to help return to the second version of the JCPOA or any other agreement,” Grossi said.
“There are problems, I’ll be honest with you. We do cooperate with Iran. I don’t deny this. This is important for inspection. My Iranian colleagues often say that Iran is the most inspected country in the world. Well, it is, and for good reason. But this is not enough,” he said.
On Saturday, France, Germany, and the UK issued a joint statement condemning Iran for “hollowing out the JCPOA” by enriching uranium to near-weapons-grade at a breakneck pace. Iran defiantly announced plans to enrich even more uranium after the IAEA censured it.https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2024/06/18/nobody-follows-it-u-n-nuclear-w...
Forum
Pages: 1
Iran Chairs UN Disarmament Conference (Read 242 times)
