On Thursday, CBS News’ Margaret Brennan interviewed Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Among other things, Grossi told Brennan that after the war ends, “we will still inherit a number of major issues”
Grossi said U.S. military action has degraded Iran’s nuclear program—but parts of the program have survived, and Iran still has the technical know-how to enrich uranium. Last June’s U.S. bombing campaign against three Iranian nuclear facilities—the Fordo and Natanz enrichment sites and the Isfahan research site—was “quite effective,” Grossi said. Some strikes have also been reported on nuclear facilities in the current military operation, though Grossi said they have been “relatively marginal” considering the war’s broader scope.
“One cannot deny that this has really rolled back the program considerably,” he said. “But my impression is that once the military effort comes to an end, we will still inherit a number of major issues that have been at the center of all of this.”
One of those issues is Iran’s stockpile of 60%-enriched uranium, which neither Grossi nor Brennan acknowledged was produced as part of Iran’s response to Donald Trump’s taking the US out of the 2015 nuclear agreement and imposing unilateral “maximum pressure” sanctions on Iran in 2018.
