UN Nuclear Chief: Iran Could Resume Enrichment Within Months

By Staff, Agencies

The head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog Rafael Grossi announced that US strikes on Iran fell short of causing total damage to its nuclear program and that Tehran could restart enriching uranium “in a matter of months,” contradicting US President Donald Trump’s claims the US set Tehran’s ambitions back by decades.

Grossi’s remarks align with a US intelligence assessment that recent strikes on Iranian nuclear sites caused only limited damage, likely delaying the program by just a few months.

While the final military and intelligence assessment has yet to come, Trump has repeatedly claimed to have “completely and totally obliterated” Tehran’s nuclear program.

In an interview with CBS broadcast Sunday, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Amir-Saeid Iravani, said that his country’s uranium enrichment will “never stop” because Iran has an “inalienable right” to do so for “peaceful nuclear activity.”

US military officials have in recent days provided some new information about the planning of the strikes, but offered no new evidence of their effectiveness against Iran’s nuclear program.

Following classified briefings this week, Republican lawmakers acknowledged the US strikes may not have eliminated all of Iran’s nuclear materials – but argued that this was never part of the military’s mission.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported on Sunday the US had obtained intercepted messages in which senior Iranian officials discussing the attacks said they were not as destructive as they anticipated.

Asked about the different assessments, Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA], told CBS’s “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan”: “This hourglass approach in weapons of mass destruction is not a good idea.”

“The capacities they have are there. They can have, you know, in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium, or less than that. But as I said, frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there,” he told Brennan, according to a transcript released ahead of the broadcast.

“It is clear that there has been severe damage, but it’s not total damage,” Grossi went on to say. “Iran has the capacities there; industrial and technological capacities. So if they so wish, they will be able to start doing this again.”

Grossi also told CBS News that the IAEA has resisted pressure to say whether Iran has nuclear weapons or was close to having weapons before the strikes.

“We didn’t see a program that was aiming in that direction [of nuclear weapons], but at the same time, they were not answering very, very important questions that were pending.”