Iran could restart enriching uranium in months, says nuclear watchdog head

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Iran could be able to start producing enriched uranium again “in a matter of months”, the head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog said, adding that there is no military solution to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that while US bombs had dealt a “very serious level of damage” to Iran’s nuclear facilities, “one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there”.

In an interview with CBS news due to air on Sunday, Grossi said: “They can have, you know, in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium.”

Grossi’s comments follow a week of conflicting claims about the level of damage done to Iran’s nuclear programme by Israeli and US forces during the 12-day war launched by Israel this month.

Israel began bombing Iran’s nuclear and military sites on June 13, and also killed several senior Iranian nuclear scientists in a series of targeted assassinations. The US then bombed three of Iran’s most important nuclear facilities: Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, on June 21.

Rafael Grossi: ‘They can have . . . in a matter of months, I would say, a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium’ © Yoan Valat/EPA/Shutterstock

But the true extent of the damage to Iran’s nuclear programme — which Tehran insists is for peaceful civilian purposes — remains unclear.

Donald Trump, the US president, said the sites had been “obliterated”, while the chief of staff of the Israeli military, Eyal Zamir, said Israel believed it had set the project back by “years” — although he cautioned that this did not mark the end of the Israeli campaign.

But both US and European intelligence agencies have suggested that the damage may have been less extensive, with a provisional US assessment leaked to the media this week suggesting Iran’s programme was set back by only a matter of months.

A key question is the fate of Iran’s 400kg stockpile of highly enriched uranium — a vital ingredient for a bomb — which preliminary intelligence assessments provided to European governments indicate remains largely intact.

Two officials told the Financial Times this week that the assessments suggested the stockpile was not concentrated in Fordow at the time of last weekend’s attack, but had been distributed to various other locations.

“We don’t know where this material could be, or if part of it could have been, you know, under the attack during those 12 days,” Grossi told CBS.

“So some could have been destroyed as part of the attack, but some could have been moved. So there has to be at some point a clarification.”

He added that Iran retained the expertise to enrich uranium to weapons grade. “There is the self-evident truth that the knowledge is there. The industrial capacity is there,” he said. “Military operations or not, you are not going to solve this in a definitive way militarily.”