SHAFAQNA – Bloomberg | by Jonathan Tirone and Ladane Nasseri : Iran has room to cooperate further with international inspectors who have conducted a record number of snap visits last year, according to a top diplomat, as doubts about the future of a landmark 2015 nuclear deal remain following the U.S. decision to quit the accord.
“There’s room to provide us with more proactive and timely cooperation,” Yukiya Amano, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s director general, said Monday in Vienna. “I am not saying we have any concerns. The agency has conducted complementary accesses to all the sites and locations in Iran which we needed to visit.”
One of the agency’s most powerful tools is “Complementary Access,” or so-called snap inspections, which provide short-notice entrance to nuclear sites and other facilities and weren’t an option for the IAEA in Iran before the nuclear deal. In 2017, the second full year of the accord, the 35 snap inspections in the Islamic Republic were the most for any country in at least six years, agency data show.
The IAEA’s board of governors convened Monday in Vienna for the first time since U.S. President Donald Trump abandoned the agreement, known as the JCPOA, that broadened inspections in the country in exchange for an easing of some sanctions. Amano previously warned that allowing the deal to fail would be a “great loss for nuclear verification.”
The worst-case scenario in the event of the deal collapsing could see Iran leave the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, potentially casting the Middle East into a new crisis, a senior Iranian official said last week.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei earlier asked the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran to start preliminary work and preparations toward reaching 190,000 separative work units, a key measure of a country’s nuclear enrichment capacity, while staying within the framework of the nuclear agreement. He said European signatories to the nuclear deal can’t expect Iran to both “bear sanctions” and have its nuclear program restricted by the 2015 accord.
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