The International Atomic Energy Agency needs to be able to inspect everywhere in Iran, from military bases to suspicious run-down warehouses, INSS Arms Control program head Emily Landau told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.
Landau was reacting to the IAEA’s seeming thumbing its nose at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a statement issued on Tuesday, in which it seemed to brush off his demand during his September UN speech that it probe certain newly disclosed Iranian nuclear sites.
The Iran expert said that the real question is not whether the IAEA needs to do more inspections of Iranian military facilities or of undeclared clandestine sites, but, rather, “the point is to be able to inspect any suspicious facility: whether a warehouse, materials and equipment, archives or actual military bases.
“It should all be in one category of undeclared nuclear facilities where Iran is conducting activities which are relevant to its nuclear program,” she said.
She said that part of the problem is that “the JCPOA unfortunately doesn’t give them that authority. That’s why the P5+1 need to press for this. But the P5+1 are not pressing them to do that, because they agreed to the miserably inadequate” inspection provisions in the first place.
“The hypocrisy needs to be revealed. Key European states say they need to save the JCPOA for their own security. If it is for their security and they took these revelations [from Israel about undisclosed Iranian sites] seriously, how could it be that they aren’t pressing for immediate inspections?
“One thing that is very important to emphasize,” she explained, “which is not recognized enough by the wider public: in the context of the JCPOA, the P5+1 caved to Iran’s demand to be treated” by the IAEA “as a ‘normal member’ of the NPT.”
