Access to Parchin, a vast military base with a small corner devoted to suspected nuclear research, is one of the most controversial elements of the entire nuclear agreement.
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The institute cited commercial satellite images in an email to The Associated Press, saying they show “renewed activity” at the site.
While such a clean-up operation is not explicitly banned under the pending nuclear agreement between Iran, the US, and five other world powers, it does raise questions about how much Iran is willing to disclose about its past nuclear activity. Certainly, he was pointing out and, at the same time, strongly rejecting the possibility of starting a war with Iran, or imposing it on Iran, as the final solution to the nuclear issue.
And the IAEA has repeatedly gotten access, visiting Parchin twice in 2005.
Inspectors are expected to arrive around mid-October at the highly controversial Iranian nuclear facility, Parchin. Professor William Beeman of the University of Minnesota said, “Honestly, I think Amano needs to step down”.
But on Wednesday, a US government official confirmed to CNN that the IAEA is aware of the activity, adding it would not interfere with future inspections.
In particular, he was to address two confidential side deals the IAEA signed with Tehran. It imports around 10 billion cubic meters of gas per year from Iran.
The IAEA chief told reporters he recognized the frustrations, but said he “explained that my legal obligation is to protect safeguards confidentiality”. “Iran’s ideological foundation for us is still too exotic for forming a political partnership”, he said.
“They are certainly not going to see the site that existed”.
But it doesn’t really matter whether Amano has good reasons for not telling Congress what’s in the side agreements. This process presents a far better situation than the status quo under which Iran could potentially produce enough nuclear material to make a bomb in two to three months. Presidential candidate Jeb Bush has called the deal an “appeasement”; another presidential hopeful, Mike Huckabee, has said the agreement will march Israel “to the door of the oven”, while a Saudi commentator believes the deal “has opened the gates of evil” in West Asia. Furthermore, world powers are bound to help, not hinder, Iran as it develops new nuclear technology and once the terms of the deal expires, Iran can be just days away from building an atomic weapon by enriching its storehouses of endless amounts of weapons-grade uranium.
Dmitry Yevstafiev, from the Centre for Policy Studies in Russian Federation, estimated the chances of the agreement’s implementation at 50-50, since approval of the compromise reached in Vienna could be hard to obtain within Iran.
“If fully implemented, the JCPOA will verifiably prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon”, the statement said.
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“A lot of this debate…is a red herring created by people who were never going to support this agreement in the first place”. The Gulf States look northwestto the Iranian-backed Assad regime butchering hundreds of thousands in Syria, northwest to the Iranian proxy insurgency Hezbollah controlling swaths of Lebanon and storing one of the world’s largest non-state reserves of high-precision missiles and south to Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen fighting in civilian areas and killing tens of thousands.
