IAEA chief says “serious problems” with Iran’s nuclear program may persist after war. Here are the highlights of his CBS News interview.
The United Nations’ top nuclear watchdog told CBS News that Iran could revive parts of its nuclear program, even if US military strikes do not – and said any task to recover Iran’s enriched uranium would be extremely difficult.
Rafael Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, spoke with “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan on Thursday, as the US and Israel’s war with Iran approaches the three-week mark. President Trump has identified Iran’s nuclear program as one of the catalysts for the war, accusing Iran of harboring ambitions to build nuclear weapons, which Iran denies.
Grossi spoke about the possible status of Iran’s nuclear program, the prospect of restarting it and whether a deal to stop the program would be possible before war.
Here are the biggest takeaways:
After the end of the war, “we will still inherit many great stories”
Grossi said the US military’s actions had undermined Iran’s nuclear program – but parts of the program remained, and Iran still had the technology to enrich uranium.
Last June’s US bombing campaign against three Iranian nuclear sites – the Fordo and Natanz enrichment sites and the Isfahan research site – “was quite successful,” Grossi said. Other strikes have also been reported on nuclear facilities in the current military operation, although Grossi said they were “very small” given the scope of the war.
“One cannot deny that this has set the system back a lot,” he said. “But my opinion is that when the military campaign is over, we will still inherit the major problems that were at the heart of all this.”
Those ongoing problems include Iran’s stockpile of 60%-enriched uranium, which is a short step away from weapons-grade material, and other facilities that may have survived a US bombing campaign, according to Grossi.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified to lawyers this week that Iran did not attempt to rebuild its uranium enrichment capacity following the June strikes. Grossi said the IAEA also “has not seen any activity” suggesting a rebuilding effort.
But “a lot has survived,” Grossi added. “They have the power, they have the knowledge, they have the industrial ability to do that.”
Military operations to remove highly enriched uranium would be “extremely challenging”
Before last June’s airstrikes, the IAEA assessed that Iran had enriched about 972 kilograms of uranium to 60%. According to the IAEA metricsabout 92.5 kilograms is theoretically enough to build one nuclear weapon if enriched to 90%.
Most of those items are likely still buried under the debris, Grossi noted.
Mr. Trump he hasn’t made a decision yet about whether to send U.S. troops to Iran to seize that material from a potentially dangerous operation, CBS News reported earlier this week. White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt didn’t rule out the idea, telling reporters that a low-level job was “an option on the table.”
Grossi said getting that item back would be difficult.
“We are talking about cylinders that contain uranium hexafluoride gas that is highly contaminated at 60%, so it is very difficult to handle it,” he said. “I’m not saying it’s impossible. I know that here they have an amazing ability to do that, but it could be.” [a] a very challenging performance for sure.”
Grossi noted that when the US and Iran held informal peace talks before the war, the negotiators discussed “degrading” Iran’s highly enriched uranium to make it easier to handle.
Iran can rebuild centrifuges: “You can’t unlearn what you’ve learned”
Grossi said he believed it was “very possible to rebuild” Iran’s enrichment program.
Even if the airstrikes destroyed many of Iran’s centrifuges, the information needed to build them would not be bombed, Grossi noted.
“You can’t unlearn what you’ve learned,” she said.
Grossi described the centrifuge – which enriches uranium by spinning at high speed to separate an isotope of uranium called U-235 – as a “sophisticated washing machine.”
He added that the 2015 nuclear deal between the US and Iran predicted that Iran would have “very primitive” centrifuges, but since then, Iran has developed “the most sophisticated, fastest and most efficient machine that exists, and they know how to do it.”
Is a nuclear deal possible to stop war with Iran?
In the weeks leading up to the current war, negotiators from the US and Iran held several informal talks about Iran’s nuclear program. Hours before the US-Israeli bombing campaign began in late February, Omani Foreign Minister Badr Albusaidi, who was mediating the talks, he told CBS News that “a peace agreement can be reached.”
Albusaidi outlined the scope of a potential US-Iran deal, including Iran’s agreement that “I will never, ever have … nuclear material that would create a bomb,” and a plan to combine Iran’s existing high-enriched uranium stockpile.
Grossi said an agreement with Iran had not yet been reached, but “although there are still talks, there is always the possibility of an agreement.” Before the talks began, the negotiators were to hold technical talks in Vienna, home of the IAEA headquarters, he said.
“We had very frank and deep discussions. Therefore, one cannot deny the determination of someone who is trying to stop the war, and I applaud you for that as a diplomat and as a citizen,” he said. “But there was no agreement at that time.”
Was the Tehran Research Reactor a problem?
Another obvious stumbling block in US-Iran talks was the Tehran Research Reactor, a 1960s-era nuclear reactor that the US gave to Iran before the country’s current regime took power during the Islamic Revolution. The reactor – which can produce nuclear material for medical purposes – is powered by 20% enriched uranium, an important step towards the 90% enriched material used in weapons.
But Mr. Trump had forced Iran to end all uranium enrichment, preventing it from making fuel for research facilities. The 2015 nuclear deal between Iran, the US and several other major powers – Mr. Trump withdrew from it during his first term – he only allowed Iran to enrich uranium to 3.67%, although he said that Iran could buy fuel for the Tehran plant from abroad if needed.
After the war began, a senior Trump administration official accused reporters that Iran was actually storing uranium in a laboratory, calling claims that it was needed for medical purposes “false pretenses.” The official said that American negotiators found that with the help of the IAEA, which revealed that Iran had stored more fuel at the facility than was needed.
Asked about those allegations, Grossi said his role was to provide expertise, not to gauge whether Iran was trustworthy or not. But he said “20% is a lot of enrichment.”
Grossi noted that “we were in the midst of discussions that ranged from the assumption that there would be no enrichment,” or “something very limited.”
“So … if you’re talking about 20%, you’re going over that amount. Forget if it was there [a] stock or not,” said Grossi.
“New things” observed by the IAEA in Iran
The US intelligence community assessed last spring that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon, and the weapons program was halted in 2003. But in recent years, Iran has enriched uranium to 60%, close to the level needed to build a bomb. (Iran has long denied any interest in building a nuclear weapon and says its program is peaceful.)
Grossi told CBS News that “we haven’t seen a systematic program” like the alleged nuclear weapons development program that existed before 2003.
“But there were many, many questions about things, many unanswered,” Grossi said.
He said that after becoming the director general of the IAEA in 2019, a year and a half after Mr. With Trump withdrawing from the Obama-era nuclear deal, “we started to see new things. We started to see and find new factors that caused concern, and we were talking about them with Iran.”
He said those concerns include the discovery of uranium particles in areas that Iran has not officially declared as nuclear sites, which Grossi explained publicly in a 2024 statement.
Last year, the IAEA officially announced that it “cannot confirm that there has been no diversion of nuclear material … to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.”
