The nuclear policeman

The Hindu

13 hours ago

On July 2, Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian ordered his country to suspend cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN's nuclear watchdog. He explained this decision as 'a natural response to the unjustified, unconstructive, and destructive conduct' of the IAEA's Director General Rafael Grossi.
Tehran believes Mr. Grossi cleared the ground for Israel's unprovoked strikes on its nuclear facilities by preparing a 'misleading' report on Iran's compliance with non-proliferation obligations. On the basis of this report, the IAEA's Board of Governors on June 12, one day before Israel's attack, adopted a resolution stating that Iran had 'failed to cooperate fully' with the Agency and accused it of 'repeatedly failing to provide the Agency with technically credible explanations' to its various queries. Israel and the U.S. used this resolution to push forward the narrative that Iran was on the verge of making a nuclear bomb and the only way to stop it was to destroy its nuclear installations through 'pre-emptive' military strikes.
Subsequently, after Israel struck Iran's nuclear sites, Mr. Grossi made a clarification that seemed to walk back the impression created by the June 12 resolution. In an interview with CNN, he said, 'We did not have any proof of a systematic effort by Iran to make a nuclear weapon.' A spokesperson of Iran's Ministry of External Affairs shared the video clip of Mr. Grossi's interview on social media with the comment, 'This is too late, Mr. Grossi: you obscured this truth in your absolutely biased report…Do you know how many innocent Iranians have been killed/maimed as a result of this criminal war? You've made IAEA a partner to this unjust war of aggression.'
It cannot be denied that Mr. Grossi and the IAEA have played a major role in shaping the discourse around Iran's nuclear programme. But is there merit in the Iranian claim that under Mr. Grossi, the IAEA has been acting in alignment with Western, and in particular, Israeli political interests?
Mr. Grossi, 64, is a diplomat from the Argentine Foreign Service. In a career spanning 40 years, he carved a niche for himself in nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, serving as president of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (2014-2016) before assuming office as Director General of the IAEA on December 3, 2019. He said in a 2020 interview, 'I feel like I prepared for this my whole life.'
As the IAEA chief, Mr. Grossi made headlines in 2022 for his energetic efforts to secure Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which was caught in the cross-fire of the Ukraine-Russia war. An accidental strike on it could unleash a nuclear disaster that would impact much of Europe. Mr. Grossi, at some risk to his own life, personally visited the nuclear plant near the frontline even as shells rained down not far away. With the consent of the Ukrainian leadership, he shut down all but one reactor, and as an additional safety measure, left behind a team of UN inspectors — an arrangement that continues to this day. But his efforts did not stop there.
A month later, he went to St. Petersburg and met Russian President Vladimir Putin. His mission: to extract an assurance that Russian forces would not target the Zaporizhzhia plant. Mr. Grossi's trip had the intended effect, with the Russians steering clear of attacking the facility.
IAEA's mandate
Mr. Grossi's actions were fully in keeping with the mandate of the IAEA, which is to promote and safeguard peaceful nuclear programmes all over the world. Today, however, the IAEA is known more as an agency tasked with verifying that nuclear materials meant for civilian use are not diverted for weaponisation. In fact, IAEA inspectors cannot, and are not mandated to, search for weapons. They merely monitor nuclear facilities to ensure that the signatory country is fulfilling its obligations under the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement (CSA).
Critically, IAEA inspections, by design, are incapable of generating verifiable evidence of the absence of a military nuclear programme. Nor can its reports — with their catalogue of 'failures' in compliance or cooperation — serve as a proxy for the existence of a weaponisation programme, in the absence of independent intel proving as much. Since IAEA inspections cannot possibly cover every square inch of a vast country, the problem of 'unknowns' at 'undeclared' locations are a given. While these might warrant further investigation, it is questionable whether they can be used to fuel speculation about a country's intentions at a time of escalating tensions.
And yet, the ambiguous wording in the IAEA resolution and Mr. Grossi's public statements did precisely that, lending credence to the narrative of Iran building a nuclear bomb. Ironically, American intel leaked to the media, as well as a statement in March 2025 by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, confirmed that Iran was not building a bomb.
Another major element of this narrative was that Iran had 400 kg of highly enriched uranium (HEU), which is not needed for civilian use. Mr. Grossi dwelled on this aspect often in his public pronouncements. Yet, it is not illegal under the NPT for a signatory country to hold uranium enriched to 60%. For Iran, however, it was prohibited, but only under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the 2015 agreement which limited its enrichment rights to 3.67% and capped its stockpiling of enriched uranium at 300kg.
But the JCPOA became defunct — at least from the Iranian perspective — the moment the U.S. withdrew from it in 2018 and the sanctions relief guaranteed under it for Iran failed to materialise. But Mr. Grossi went along with the position of holding Iran to a JCPOA the West had already scuttled, while disregarding the IAEA's own resolutions that prohibit military attacks on civilian nuclear installations.
Attacks prohibited
The IAEA's General Conference resolution (407) adopted in November 1983 states that 'all armed attacks against nuclear installations devoted to peaceful purposes should be explicitly prohibited'. A draft resolution of September 26, 1985, submitted jointly by Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden not only forbade Israel from targeting Iraq's civilian nuclear facilities, it further called 'upon Israel urgently to place all its nuclear facilities under IAEA safeguards' – something difficult to envisage at a time when exemption for Israel from international law is getting increasingly normalised. Incidentally, both these resolutions were from a time when the IAEA was led by Mr. Grossi's illustrious predecessor, Hans Blix. Under the IAEA statutes and the UN charter, Iran is entitled to a peaceful nuclear programme. It is also entitled to protection of its nuclear installations from military attacks. And yet, Mr. Grossi never condemned the Israeli and U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities. On the contrary, his words and deeds amplified suspicions about Iran's intentions, which were used by Israel and the U.S. to justify their attack.
Today, in the aftermath of a fragile and difficult ceasefire, Mr. Grossi is back to stoking fears about Iran's nuclear programme by claiming it could start enriching uranium again in a matter of months. Not surprisingly, Iran has refused to allow IAEA inspection of its bombed-out nuclear facilities, with the Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, stating, 'Grossi's insistence on visiting the bombed sites under the pretext of safeguards is meaningless and possibly even malign in intent.'
Had Mr. Grossi displayed a little of the same urgency for protecting Iran's civilian nuclear facilities that he did for Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, it may have gone some way toward protecting the IAEA's credibility among nuclear threshold states.