IAEA Head: “We Did Not Have Any Proof” of Iran Building Nuclear Weapon

The head of the leading intergovernmental watchdog for nuclear energy and atomic weapons has confirmed that the agency has not found “any proof” of an effort to obtain a nuclear weapon by Iran, lending yet more evidence contradicting Israel’s “self-defense” narrative for its war on the country.

In an interview this week, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi said that, while it is possible that there are operations being kept secret from regulators, reports that Iran has not been actively pursuing a nuclear weapon since 2003 are accurate.

Those claiming to know exact details about Iran moving toward a nuclear weapon are engaging in “speculation,” he told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.

“If there was some activity which was clandestine or hidden or away from our inspectors, we couldn’t know,” said Grossi. What the agency has reported, he said, is that “we did not have — as in coincidence with some of the sources you mentioned there — that we did not have any proof of a systematic effort to move into a nuclear weapon.”

This undercuts Israel’s claims that it has evidence that Iran is working to obtain a nuclear bomb. Israeli officials say they’re so sure of this that they have started a war supposedly in order to stop it from happening.

These claims aren’t backed up by any other sources. As Tulsi Gabbard, the top intelligence official in President Donald Trump’s administration, has testified, U.S. intelligence officials have not found evidence of Iran moving toward a nuclear weapon.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested that Iran is actually pursuing a nuclear weapon in “secret”. But a lack of proof of a claim is hardly a legitimate reason to begin a war.

Grossi’s clear reiteration of IAEA’s findings are significant as Netanyahu and pro-Israel lawmakers in the U.S. have used IAEA’s findings in order to justify the war, misleadingly using the agency’s reports as evidence of Iran working toward a nuclear bomb even as the agency has definitively said it has no evidence of that.

For its part, Iran has long insisted that its nuclear development is for civilian purposes. IAEA has, indeed, found evidence that Iran possesses some of the elements needed for a nuclear bomb, but has emphasized that it has not found evidence for active bomb development.

Last week, the group admonished Iran for not complying with the terms of an international nuclear non-proliferation agreement it’s party to — the deal that Trump withdrew from during his first term.

Iran has threatened to withdraw from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a result of the war, but that’s an agreement that Israel never signed onto, with Israel widely believed to have at least 90 nuclear warheads and materials to create hundreds more. IAEA has assessed Israel to be one of the only nine countries in the world known to have nuclear weapons.

Netanyahu’s claims of definitive evidence of Iran pursuing a nuclear bomb are clearly politically motivated. Netanyahu has spent over three decades presenting supposed evidence that Iran is just months or years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Further, even if Iran has a secretive program to obtain nuclear weapons, Israel’s aggression is actually making it harder for inspectors to make a determination either way. Bloomberg reported on Wednesday that inspectors are currently unable to determine the location of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile because of the war.

“In a time of war, all nuclear sites are closed. No inspections, no normal activity can take place,” Grossi told Bloomberg Television, adding that Iranian officials had told him that the stockpile would be moved in the case of war.