The United Nations nuclear watchdog agency is “increasingly concerned” about its lack of access to an underground Iranian uranium enrichment facility that Tehran has acknowledged exists but refused to allow inspectors to visit, according to Reuters. “The Agency does not know the exact location of the IFEP, its safeguards status or whether it contains nuclear material,” Reuters quoted the International Atomic Energy Agency as saying in a quarterly report to member states, referring to the Isfahan Fuel Enrichment Plant (IFEP). The IAEA asked Iran to allow inspectors to visit IFEP in February, but Tehran refused, telling the UN agency that “conditions resulting from acts of aggression and continued threats have created a situation in which the normal implementation of safeguards is legally unsustainable and materially impracticable.” It had since observed, in satellite images, “regular vehicular activity around the entrance to the tunnel complex in Isfahan,” where the agency believes some of Iran’s roughly 900-pound stockpile of highly enriched uranium would have been buried by the June 2025 missile strikes, the nuclear watchdog agency says, citing attacks on its territory. Iranian technicians watch as an inspector from the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency works at the Isfahan Uranium Conversion Facility (UCF), south of Tehran, Iran, in a file photo from August 8, 2005. BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP/Getty The Trump administration has framed Iran’s controversial nuclear program as the main justification for war, but has vacillated during the conflict between suggesting that Iran would voluntarily give up its remaining stockpile, or “More than 80 percent of its nuclear industrial base is gone,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared earlier this week, adding, “THE CRAZY ISLAMISTS IN TEHRAN WILL NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON.” A senior Iranian security official insisted that Tehran “would not remove a single particle of enriched nuclear material from the country.” President Trump said Thursday that “we don’t need a deal with Iran,” suggesting he might be willing to leave the issue unresolved.
