Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency gave an interview to Financial Times, published on June 6, which covered the full range of matters under the IAEA’s purview but his most interesting remarks came with respect to Iran. “Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon at this moment, but it has the material,” he says, but a bomb could emerge very swiftly. He added that while President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff has reopened talks, Israel’s threats to strike Iran’s nuclear program mean that “the Iranian thing has incredible potential to become catastrophic. If there is a failure in negotiation, this will imply most probably military action.”
Worse, Iran’s nuclear capabilities could not be destroyed with a single surgical strike. “The most sensitive things are half a mile underground—I have been there many times,” Grossi said. “To get there you take a spiral tunnel down, down, down.”
FT notes that many of Trump’s critics say that Witkoff, a former property developer, lacks credentials. But Grossi demurs. “I have seen cases where countries have to be convinced they want to negotiate. But here it is not the case—the talks are very serious,” he says. “Witkoff is an extremely serious person—I don’t subscribe to the idea that he is not. I cannot express [political] preferences ... but what I can say is that [Trump] has triggered negotiations where there were none before, and this is objectively commendable.”
Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei told reporters today that Iran will soon hand a counter-proposal for a nuclear deal to the United States via Oman. “The U.S. proposal is not acceptable to us. It was not the result of previous rounds of negotiations. We will present our own proposal to the other side via Oman after it is finalized. This proposal is reasonable, logical, and balanced,” Baghaei said, reported Reuters. “We must ensure before the lifting of sanctions that Iran will effectively benefit economically and that its banking and trade relations with other countries will return to normal.”
