IAEA has lost much of its visibility into Iran’s nuclear program, and restoring oversight would be difficult even after a new agreement

The International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, has lost much of the information and continuity needed to monitor Iran’s nuclear program, and rebuilding a credible verification baseline would be difficult even if a new agreement became possible in the future. The EU’s special envoy for non-proliferation and disarmament, Ambassador Stephan Klement, described the situation in Iran as one of the most serious current challenges for the international non-proliferation system and warned that the gradual unraveling of the previous monitoring framework cannot be immediately reversed by signing a new political agreement.

In brief, the EU special envoy says that the IAEA has lost most of the information needed to track Iran’s nuclear program and that the current level of knowledge is greatly reduced compared with the period when the nuclear agreement was operational. Even if a new agreement were negotiated, the IAEA would first have to rebuild a sufficient technical baseline to verify compliance. Brussels believes this process would be difficult because continuous monitoring of nuclear activities was interrupted and information about developments that occurred in the meantime would have to be reconstructed. The EU is also concerned about the accelerated development of Iran’s missile program, which it treats separately from the strictly nuclear issue. The EU presents Iran’s situation within the broader context of the weakening of the international non-proliferation and arms-control architecture.

Stephan Klement described Iran’s nuclear program as a dossier at a much more difficult point than during the period when the nuclear agreement gave the IAEA an extensive monitoring framework. In his assessment, the current problem is not only the absence of a functioning political agreement, but also the gradual loss of the technical information that would allow a potential future agreement to be verified.

The agreement built in previous years was, in the EU envoy’s words, “destroyed” or dismantled successively. As the cooperation framework deteriorated and conflicts involving Iran unfolded, the IAEA’s ability to track nuclear activities was severely reduced.

Klement said the agency had lost “most or perhaps almost all” of the knowledge needed to control Iran’s program. The statement refers to the continuity of monitoring information and the ability to establish precisely what happened during periods when access or oversight was limited.

For the verification of a nuclear agreement, this continuity is essential. Inspectors must be able to compare stocks, materials, facilities and activities against a known baseline so that any subsequent change can be identified and explained.

If this baseline is lost, simply restoring access does not automatically mean that the agency can instantly reconstruct the existing situation. The IAEA would have to determine what activities took place during the period when oversight was reduced and establish a new reference point sufficiently credible for future monitoring.

Klement said this stage would be difficult even if, at some point, there were political will to conclude a new agreement. Such a document would need a verification system, and verification would depend on the IAEA’s ability to reconstruct a sufficiently complete technical picture.

The EU nevertheless considers the prospect of a new agreement to remain distant at present. The European envoy did not indicate that advanced negotiations were underway and described the current context as one in which monitoring capacity must first be restored.

The nuclear issue is also accompanied by the development of Iran’s missile program. Klement said that, in recent years, there had been a broad expansion of this capability, with implications both for regional security and for Europe.

The two dossiers are distinct, but they intersect within the non-proliferation architecture. A nuclear program becomes more strategically significant when a state is simultaneously developing means capable of carrying payloads over long distances.

For Brussels, Iran is one of the examples showing how difficult it is to rebuild multilateral mechanisms after they have been weakened. The nuclear verification system relies not only on treaties and political declarations, but also on years of technical data, inspections and operational continuity.

Klement linked the situation in Iran to the need to maintain European funding and political support for the IAEA. The EU uses its foreign and security policy budget to support international institutions in the field of non-proliferation, including the IAEA, the OPCW and the CTBTO.

For the Union, these institutions are an essential part of international verification capacity. In an environment where political agreements can unravel, preserving expertise, inspectors and monitoring infrastructure is considered necessary so that a control system can be rebuilt when political conditions allow it.

Iran’s situation coincides with a period in which several global mechanisms are under pressure. This year’s review conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons did not produce a final document, New START expired without a replacement, and the major powers are modernizing or expanding their arsenals.

In this context, Brussels does not view the loss of monitoring in Iran as an isolated problem, but as part of the degradation of an international architecture built to limit proliferation and provide verifiable information about nuclear activities.

The IAEA’s role is to verify compliance with nuclear obligations through inspections, monitoring and analysis of declared materials and facilities. The effectiveness of verification depends largely on continuity of access and the existence of a technical database that allows the situation at one point in time to be compared with that at another.

In Iran’s case, the issue highlighted by the EU is precisely the deterioration of this continuity. A potential future agreement would therefore have to address two problems simultaneously: the political conditions concerning the nuclear program and the rebuilding of technical verification capacity.

The assessment conveyed in SEDE is that the second component could become one of the most difficult parts of any future diplomatic process.��

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