The Davos Forum, Rafael Grossi and the Iranian Nuclear Threat
Is the Iranian nuclear threat back? That would appear to be the case according to the main headline in Israel’s Ma’ariv newspaper last week (19 January 2024). The front page lead story announced that Iran was “on the verge of a bomb”. Basing itself on an interview given by IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi at the Davos Forum to the Bloomberg news site, the report inside the paper continued with “Iran is racing towards nuclear weapons”. According to the original Bloomberg site interview, Iran has sufficient enriched uranium to build a number of nuclear warheads. But was this the IAEA Director General’s only message at the Davos Forum?
Rafael Grossi was very active in the Davos Forum summit last week and held many meetings with heads of state, ministers, politicians, and heads of economic corporations. It turns out that on the sidelines of the Forum, Grossi also gave several one on one interviews to journalists in which he spoke more freely than he usually does at the formal press conferences at the IAEA headquarters in Vienna. For example, when he was talking to the Bloomberg correspondent, the France24 correspondent, the Al Monitor site, and the National News. Using excerpts from Grossi’s interviews and talks at Davos, I will try to build a picture: what does Grossi think about the Iranian nuclear issue? And to describe in an orderly manner what the IAEA Director General said and why his words are important.
According to Grossi, the IAEA is mostly concerned about the acceleration of the enrichment of uranium to 60% which is the closest that Iran has been to uranium enriched to a military level (90%) for nuclear weapons. But the picture is more complicated. According to the latest monitoring report (November 2023), Iran has a stock of 128 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium. At the end of December 2023, Iran violated its “understandings agreement” with the US which had been intended to slow down the pace of uranium enrichment at the highest level, and returned to the acceleration route. But in an aside to the France24 reporter, Grossi revealed information that will probably appear in the next monitoring report – “there is a plateau at the moment”, but then immediately added a reservation “but it could change in the next few days…We never know”.
The picture is complex and sensitive. The IAEA Director General emphasized that he was not saying that Iran has nuclear weapons. Iran has a worrying stockpile of high level enriched uranium, but it does not have nuclear warheads. Iran is the only country in the world that is a not a nuclear weapons state which is enriching uranium to such a high level. With surprising openness, Grossi said that the IAEA does not have “anything” against Iran’s nuclear program as long as it exists in a transparent manner in cooperation with the IAEA monitors. As long as Iran abides by all its NPT obligations and the IAEA’s safeguard rules. According to the NPT definitions, Iran is a country which is not a nuclear weapons state and is forbidden from developing nuclear weapons.
In this context, Grossi is most worried by the obstacles that Iran is presenting to the IAEA inspectors. Most importantly, limiting the entry of experienced monitors from western countries. He is irked by the situation in which Iran is punishing the IAEA because of “external things”, and that Iran is “taking the IAEA hostage” to the political disputes between the western superpowers – the US, France, and the UK – and Iran which impedes the agency from carrying out its work. Grossi emphasized that in his view, this is unacceptable. It is worth noting that in the framework of the obstacles to the IAEA’s work, Grossi does not refer to the crisis regarding the cameras at the centrifuge sites and the temporary understandings on the issue which were reached last March but with which Iran has not fully complied. In the IAEA’s view, the continued damage to the inspectors’ capabilities has serious implications, perhaps even more than the quantitative data regarding the expansion and acceleration of enriched uranium. Obstacles in the monitoring fields create a serious problem regarding the ability to ensure the uninterrupted continuity of the information tracking the Iranian nuclear program and preventing its diversion of activities in nuclear sites to a military nuclear program.
But on an optimistic note, Grossi indicated that “the dialogue with Iran remains open”. For this reason, he emphasized that “diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy… is what we need”. This is especially important against the background of the escalation in the Israel-Hamas war and the tense relations between Iran and the US which are liable to complicate the international efforts to block an Iranian nuclear weapons program. In none of the interviews that he held in Davos, did Grossi mention the 2015 JCPOA and the US and superpower efforts that continued until September 2022 to renew it.
In emphasizing the diplomatic message, was Grossi trying to signal to the superpowers that they must hurry up and renew their efforts for an outline for a new agreement? To break the dangerous deadlock in the Iranian nuclear issue? Or perhaps he was hinting that something is going on behind the scenes? Was he sending distress signals and indicating his frustration with the lack of progress on the question of “the open files” regarding the undeclared sites from the Iranian nuclear program that was closed down in 2003? The issue of the two undeclared sites from the old program in which remains of uranium particles was a central obstacle to reaching a new nuclear agreement. There are more questions than answers. Diplomatic fog of war has always been an inseparable component in the Iranian nuclear saga. Time will tell. But in the meantime, Iran has reached the dangerous status of almost a nuclear threshold state.
Where is Israel in the picture? Surprisingly, since the October 7 Hamas surprise attack, the Iranian nuclear threat had disappeared from the Israeli agenda. Precisely at a time of acceleration and expansion of the Iranian nuclear program, we had not heard a word from Prime Minister Netanyahu who had turned the “Iranians are racing towards a bomb” into a central motif in all his declarations and meetings over the past decade. And now, after more than 100 days of war in Gaza, it is back. At the end of last week, Netanyahu declared his commitment to prevent Iranian nuclear weapons, and said that only a government which he leads was capable of stopping Iran from attaining a nuclear bomb. Netanyahu forgot to tell his listeners that, as I analyzed in an earlier article, the Iranian nuclear threat has not gone anywhere. This is the because his pressure together with that of President Trump destroyed the good nuclear agreement that limited Iran’s nuclear program, and played a central role in bringing Iran to the threshold of becoming nuclear state.
Shemuel Meir is an independent Israeli strategic analyst