Nuclear Monitors Report Greater Iran Cooperation After Warning

(Bloomberg) -- Nuclear monitors said Iran had boosted its cooperation with inspection teams, after reports that officials in Tehran had offered incomplete information over a possible safeguards breach at a site exposed by Israeli agents.

Following meetings with Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in New York last month, Iran provided more detailed data to International Atomic Energy Agency officials charged with reviewing the country’s nuclear program.

“Engagement doesn’t mean that the issues are completely addressed, but this is a step in the right direction,” IAEA acting Director General Cornel Feruta said Friday at a briefing in Vienna, without giving details of the agency’s concerns. “The message that we sent out in September, and my visit to Tehran, was understood by Iranian officials.”

Feruta had warned Iran last month that “time is of the essence” in answering IAEA questions. The agency has come under increased pressure from the U.S. and Israel to report analysis of environmental samples that detected trace levels of radioactivity at a Tehran warehouse.

The findings threatened to open a new front in the tense confrontation that has engulfed Iran’s nuclear program since the U.S. withdraw from a landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Tehran and reimposed punishing economic sanctions.

Iran Suspected by Atomic Monitors of Incomplete Information

“I am quite gloomy about the prospects,” said Colombia University’s Richard Nephew, who helped negotiate the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that imposed limits on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief. “I am skeptical the JCPOA will be a live topic a year from now.”

The IAEA monitors compliance with the agreement that President Donald Trump abandoned in May 2018.

The accord capped Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium and took its advanced centrifuges offline, leaving the nation incapable of producing nuclear weapons if it so wished. But faced with the U.S. economic offensive, Iran has been scaling back compliance.

Radioactive Samples

Scores of IAEA inspectors monitor Iran, both on the ground at the country’s nuclear sites as well as remotely using surveillance technologies, looking for any breach of its compliance with the nuclear obligations.

The radioactive samples in question were taken from the Turquz-Abad site earlier this year and have been authenticated by the agency’s network of analytical laboratories, according to a senior diplomat familiar with the agency’s work in Iran, who asked not to be named in line with rules to discuss confidential information.

The site in the Iranian capital was flagged to IAEA inspectors by Israel last year, after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced his intelligence agencies had retrieved documents indicating a secret program to build nuclear bombs. Iran said the claims were recycled from events that the IAEA had already “dealt with.”

The suggestion that Iran could be providing incomplete information was a warning with potentially serious consequences.

The entire international apparatus of rules that the IAEA enforces is based on verifying the correctness and completeness of nations’ declared nuclear material and nuclear-related activities.

Countries that don’t adequately provide gram-level accounts of fissile material can be referred to the UN Security Council for possible sanction.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jonathan Tirone in Vienna at jtirone@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net, ;Lin Noueihed at lnoueihed@bloomberg.net, Mark Williams

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