IAEA's Grossi: Iran's nuclear facilities buried too deep underground to be hit by 'surgical strike'

Praising the talks between U.S. and Iran as a positive development that could avert a catastrophic war, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s director-general Rafael Mariano Grossi warned that the Islamic Republic has the materials necessary to break out toward a nuclear weapon.  

“Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon at this moment, but it has the material,” the official told the Financial Times in an in-depth interview.  

Israel’s threat of military action means that “the Iranian thing has incredible potential to become catastrophic," Grossi warned. "If there is a failure in negotiation, this will imply most probably military action.”

Worse still, Grossi said he believed that Iran’s nuclear capabilities could not be destroyed with a single surgical strike. “The most sensitive things are half a mile underground — I have been there many times,” he said. “To get there you take a spiral tunnel down, down, down.”

The Iranian mullah regime—which avowedly seeks Israel’s annihilation—has been enriching uranium to levels that have no civilian application, has obstructed international inspectors from checking its nuclear facilities, and has expanded its ballistic missile capabilities, and its officials have increasingly warned that they could pursue the bomb.

Israel, which sees a nuclear-equipped Iran as an existential threat, has said it is prepared to strike its nuclear facilities to prevent Tehran from obtaining a weapon.

Grossi, however, said that he was encouraged that the Americans and Iranians were talking, adding that he had a high opinion of Trump's Special Envoy Steve Witkoff. 

“Witkoff is an extremely serious person — I don’t subscribe to the idea that he is not. I can say is that Trump has triggered negotiations where there were none before, and this is objectively commendable.”