To Police Any New Nuclear Deal, IAEA Access Is Needed — Urgently

Will the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear watchdog, journey to Iran following the inking of a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Tehran and Washington?

According to Vice President JD Vance, and later President Donald Trump, the answer is an unequivocal yes. But Iran’s foreign ministry poured cold water on the notion, saying that this was not agreed to in last weekend’s negotiations in Switzerland. Rafael Grossi, the director general of the IAEA, chalked up this back-and-forth to being mere “political statements” and has since insisted that the IAEA will return to Iran for inspections.

With Iranian nuclear facilities and enrichment sites subjected to U.S. and Israeli military strikes in June last year and from February to April this year, a new and independent assessment of Iran’s nuclear capacity is needed more urgently than ever. The only entity that can provide such a monitoring and verification baseline is the IAEA, which has not been sufficiently incorporated into negotiations with the Islamic Republic.

IAEA Unable To Verify Status of Nuclear Program

Although there is no public evidence that Iran has resumed uranium enrichment at previously declared enrichment facilities since Operation Midnight Hammer, the IAEA has been prohibited from visiting the three facilities struck during that operation where fissile material was present: Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan. To date, the latest IAEA report from June 2026 indicates that “the Agency … cannot verify the status, for safeguards purposes, of these facilities and associated nuclear material.” 

Worse, Iran began to significantly curtail IAEA access to the country’s sprawling atomic enterprise years earlier. Starting in 2021, the same year that Tehran began to enrich uranium to 60 percent purity, Iran began to backpedal on implementation of the Additional Protocol (AP), a supplementary arrangement to Iran’s safeguards agreement with the IAEA allowing for snap inspections. This led to a monitoring and verification crisis that year, producing “monitoring gaps” and the loss of “continuity of knowledge” in sensitive areas like the manufacturing and assembly of centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium.

IAEA Visits Have Been Limited

To reiterate, the IAEA has visited select Iranian nuclear sites since war broke out last year. But these visits have been restricted to two complexes unaffected by the two recent wars targeting the regime’s nuclear industry.

These sites include the light-water reactor at Bushehr and two associated new units under construction, as well as four facilities in Tehran linked to the sanctioned Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), including the Tehran Research Reactor. While important, inspections at these sites do not absolve Iran of its safeguards infractions, nor do they contribute to a better understanding of the broader state of Iran’s atomic enterprise due to the lack of access to enrichment, conversion, and storage sites.

Additionally, the latest IAEA report did not contain any detail on sites struck in 2025 and 2026 that were believed to have previously engaged in weaponization-related activities. These sites should also be investigated and visited if Washington seeks to ensure that Tehran is not working to develop a nuclear weapon.

Deal or No Deal, Washington Must Press for Iranian Nuclear Transparency

As the Trump administration presses ahead in its diplomacy with the Islamic Republic and waives sanctions to adhere to the new MOU, it must demand a full declaration by the Islamic Republic of its past and present nuclear activities — something Tehran has yet to provide the IAEA. The Trump administration should then support and empower the agency to investigate these claims through inspections and interviews.

Similarly, it must work to restore full IAEA access in Iran to include implementing the AP as well as Modified Code 3.1 to avoid Iran building new nuclear facilities in secret. Presently, the IAEA cannot even verify the size of Iran’s uranium stockpile, nor its state after bombardment. If the Trump administration seeks to diplomatically resolve the decades-long nuclear dispute with Iran, there is no circumventing the role the IAEA can and should play in this effort.

Behnam Ben Taleblu is Iran program senior director and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). For more analysis from Behnam and FDD, please subscribe HERE. Follow FDD on X @FDD. Follow Behnam on X @therealBehnamBT. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focused on national security and foreign policy.