The Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) passed a resolution against the Iranian regime on Wednesday.
The Board of Governors, consisting of 35 member countries, has asked Iran in this resolution to take steps to cooperate with the agency more quickly and to revoke its recent decision to ban the entry of experienced inspectors.
According to Reuters and citing diplomats, 20 countries voted in favor of this resolution, 12 countries abstained, and only Russia and China opposed it.
Eighteen months ago, the Board of Governors also issued a resolution requiring the Iranian regime to cooperate with the agency’s investigations regarding uranium particles of anthropogenic origin found in locations where nuclear activities had not been previously declared to the agency.
While the number of sites under investigation has decreased from three to two, the Iranian regime has yet to provide the agency with a convincing explanation of how the uranium particles entered these sites.
Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said on Monday, June 3, that Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium, including stocks enriched up to 60%, continue to increase.
Rafael Grossi also said regarding the monitoring of Iran’s nuclear program that the agency’s stream of information on the production of centrifuges and their activities is fragmented. The Iranian regime has limited the agency’s monitoring of its nuclear program.
Grossi said it has been more than three years since the Iranian regime temporarily suspended the implementation of the Additional Protocol, and therefore, the agency has not had complementary monitoring access to Iran’s nuclear program for over three years.
Grossi also said regarding the public statements of Iranian regime officials about the government’s ability to build nuclear weapons and the possibility of changing nuclear doctrine that these actions only increase his concerns about the accuracy and completeness of Iran’s safeguard statements.
He said he once again asks the new Iranian government (the one that took office after Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash) to continue the high-level talks and technical exchanges that began as a result of the May meeting with Hossein Amir-Abdollahian (the Foreign Minister who was killed along with Raisi) and Ali Bagheri Kani, the current acting Foreign Minister.
In recent months, Iranian regime officials have threatened that they may produce nuclear weapons.
Ali Akbar Salehi, former Foreign Minister and former head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, also indirectly stated in a television program in late February 2024 that Tehran has “the necessary capability to build an atomic bomb.”
These remarks come while Iranian regime officials have previously claimed that a fatwa by the supreme leader of the Iranian regime forbids the development of nuclear weapons.
The U.S. State Department spokesperson, reacting to the repeated nuclear threats by Iranian regime officials and referring to the recent threats about the possible change in the regime’s nuclear policy, said that the United States guarantees that Iran will never attain nuclear weapons.
