‘Iran could produce enough uranium for a bomb in a month’

Civilisation is in danger, says the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose role in front-line diplomacy has never been more essential.

Everyone, reflects Rafael Grossi, makes mistakes at work. But there are also few careers where a misstep could start a world-ending war, where success depends on being unfailingly polite to people you think are lying to you, “and in which being spied on is a fact of life”.

I ask Grossi if he likes his job. “I’m not going to sugar-coat it,” he says. “It’s not easy. It takes a toll. And I don’t think of myself as a workaholic. I’ve got grey hair, which I didn’t have three years ago. But I can’t say I don’t enjoy it.”

It is the kind of job you would have to enjoy. As director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the elfin-faced, slightly scruffy 63-year-old is the nearest thing the world has to a nuclear policeman.

He is the individual ultimately responsible for stopping civilian nuclear programmes from producing either Chernobyl-like accidents, or producing bombs. And the stakes have never been higher. Last month, António Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations, and in a sense Grossi’s boss, warned last month that the world is on a “nuclear knife edge”.

The Bulletin of the Atomic

Scientists’ Doomsday Clock, an index of the danger of nuclear war, is currently set at 90 seconds to midnight – the closest since it was set up in 1947.

The war between Russia and Ukraine has seen open discussion of the possible use of nuclear weapons for the first time since the Cold War, and the Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has raised the threat – as yet averted – of meltdown in Europe. In Asia, tensions between China and Taiwan and Kim Jong Un’s unpredictable sabre rattling have stoked discussion of bomb building in other countries.

Looming over everything is Iran, which Grossi acknowledges is closer to a nuclear weapon than ever before – and where officials have, for the first time, begun to admit they might actually build one.

“I know that this kind of work requires total dedication… but there is sometimes this sense that you are prioritising your job instead of your family,” he reflects when asked about this extraordinary workload. “You learn to live with it.”

Rafael Grossi was born in 1961 into an Italian immigrant family that could loosely be described as part of the Buenos Aires intelligentsia. His father, a journalist and writer, and his mother, a sculptor, were “very good at incentivising intellectual curiosity”.

“I was raised among books, and pieces of art and exposed to very interesting people, musicians, artists, writers. So I was, you know, sucking in all that. It was great fun when they had dinners at home. I would sit and listen to incredible things, incredible stories. Interesting people saying interesting things …”

An “obsession” with history led him to study political science and, on graduation, seek a career in diplomacy.

It was a time of change in Argentina. Leopoldo Galtieri’s military junta, discredited by the disaster of the Falklands War, was on its way out and a new era of democracy was opening up. It was also a remarkable moment in diplomacy that changed Grossi’s life.

“One of the gifts that the military left to Argentina, apart from the South Atlantic war and many other follies, was a secret enrichment programme: when they were leaving in late 1983 they let the elected president of Argentina know that they had a secret facility in the middle of Patagonia that was enriching uranium.

“So, when I was joining the foreign service, the minister created a unit to deal with all the international aspects of nuclear. They came to our group and they said ‘who would like to work in the nuclear affairs department?’

“I raised my hand very, very high. I said, ‘That sounds exciting and interesting.’ And that changed my life.”

There followed a six-month stint at a nuclear facility learning the practical side of the industry and technology, and a ringside seat at one of the most successful non-proliferation efforts in history.

Argentina never actually produced a bomb, but there were for a while serious fears of an arms race with Brazil, which had been running a similar programme. The way those two countries averted that nuclear rivalry is considered a gold standard in non-proliferation, and the more we talk, the more it becomes apparent that the experience of representing a developing country with an opaque nuclear programme hugely impacts his work today.

His experience has direct lessons for current crises, including that surrounding Iran, although it has gone much further than either Argentina or Brazil.

Since Donald Trump pulled the United States out of a deal offering sanctions relief in exchange for nuclear restrictions in 2018, Iran has vastly expanded its enrichment activities and the IAEA has lost much of the access it once had to monitor it.

Grossi hasn’t managed to stop Tehran stepping up enrichment, and he has publicly complained that he is not being shown everything. But the IAEA’s limited visibility remains the only reliable source of information on the programme.

It’s because of the IAEA presence that we know Iran has started enriching uranium to 60 per cent – it is just a simple step to enrich that material to 90 per cent – the concentration required for a weapon..

That has prompted some alarming reports. In January, David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector, said Iran had accumulated sufficient 60-per-cent enriched material to produce enough 90-per-cent uranium for its first weapon in just a week.

Grossi thinks that is an exaggeration – but not by very much. “I don’t think they can do it so fast. But frankly speaking, they could do it in a matter of perhaps a month or a bit more.

“That doesn’t take away from the fact that they are very close. They have enough material for a few warheads already. But let’s not confuse people. They do not have nuclear weapons at this point.”

However, the current crisis in the Middle East has been accompanied by a worrying shift in rhetoric. Iran has always denied seeking a bomb. Supreme leader Ali Khamenei has even issued a fatwa banning nuclear weapons on religious grounds.

But in May, Kamal Karai, an adviser to the supreme leader, said that although Iran’s leaders had not made a decision to build a weapon, they would have “no choice but to change our military doctrine” if attacked. He was only one of several senior figures to make such comments. Grossi publicly and privately condemned them.

“I told them – I told late foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and acting minister Bagheri Kani, and the president of the atomic energy agency of Iran – this cannot be. These are very senior people. These are people with important responsibilities. And if this is so, then this means that you’re not telling me the entire story.”

The previous foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, personally assured Grossi that Iran has no intention of leaving the NonProliferation Treaty. The pair, says the IAEA director, had managed to achieve a decent working relationship and understanding, if not actual agreement. But Amir-Abdollahian died in a helicopter crash alongside Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi in May.

His acting successor was similarly reassuring, but diplomacy is more or less frozen until Iran elects a new president.

Voting got under way yesterday – with preliminary election results expected to be released by this morning – to choose between Saeed Jalili, a conservative hardliner and former nuclear negotiator who has always rejected the notion that Iran should discuss or compromise on its enrichment activities, and Masoud Pezeshkian, a former surgeon and health minister backed by the more moderate reformists who originally negotiated the 2015 nuclear deal Donald Trump walked away from and who might seek to revive it.

On the face of it, a Pezeshkian administration might present more hopes for curbing Iranian nuclear activities. But neither would have ultimate authority over foreign and nuclear policy.

That remains the privilege of the mercurial Khamenei. “I would never disrespect the voice of the supreme leader of Iran, but at the same time, it is true that this may change,” says Grossi.

Loose talk in Tehran is just part of a wider trend that Grossi says preoccupies him. There is, he says, a general acceleration in nuclear rhetoric – a normalisation of discussion of using nuclear weapons – that is deeply alarming.

He is too diplomatic to name names, but he doesn’t have to. Last week, Vladimir Putin said that Russia might change its nuclear doctrine, setting out the conditions in which warheads might be used. Some Russian experts have publicly called for a return to nuclear testing as a way to intimidate the West over its support for Ukraine.

Robert O’Brien, a former national security adviser to Donald Trump who is tipped to play a role in the administration if Trump wins the US election, last month called on the United States to do the same, citing Russian and Chinese nuclear expansion.

China itself is rapidly expanding its nuclear arsenal, and studies of a possible conflict in the Pacific over Taiwan predict it will involve “implicit and explicit” nuclear threats. In the Middle East, Saudi Arabia has openly said it will seek a bomb if Iran got one.

It’s not just the Saudis, says Grossi. “Other countries as well have said openly in the region, not too far from there, that if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, then they would have to do the same. And if you open up your map a little bit and go to Asia, there are other countries where a discussion is also taking place.

“Some are saying, well, maybe the nuclear options should not be ruled out. And this, I think, is a tremendous danger, and one that can put us on a terribly dangerous path as human civilisation. Because the moment you have two or three countries with nuclear weapons, the possibility of their use is very high.”

Managing these forces requires the purest distillation of the diplomatic art – shuttling between leaders who in some cases literally want to kill each other, and maintaining the trust of both.

It is a high-stakes game. Maintaining cordial relationships in both Washington and Tehran is just part of it. Grossi also has to speak to both Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky, persuading the former to allow his inspectors to remain at Zaporizhzhia, while reassuring the latter their presence is effective and not simply being exploited by the Russians for propaganda.

In March, he flew to Damascus to persuade Bashar Assad, the pariah president of Syria, wanted by the ICC for war crimes, to allow IAEA inspectors to address “lingering doubts about yet another country reviving the flames of past nuclear ambitions”. It took months of back channelling just to arrange that meeting.

Grossi disgruntles plenty of those he speaks to. But he claims never to have bowed to pressure from any of them, which is one reason he believes he was unanimously re-elected at the end of his first four-year term in December 2023. Even those who don’t like him realise he does not have an agenda.

“That was the biggest compliment I could get,” he says. “The art of the good diplomat is to show people that they have an objective interest in working with you. International politics are driven by national interest. And I have to recognise that, otherwise I’m useless.”

He rejects the charge that diplomats, in making a virtue of ambiguity, end up saying and believing nothing. But he is adamant that performative virtue signalling gets them nowhere.

“National respect is extremely important. This is why I think that diplomatic wokism is horrible. One needs to be aware that negotiating with a Western European is completely different than negotiating with an Asian or negotiating with an African or with a Latin American.

“When you talk to somebody from somewhere you better know a couple of things: why do they say this; how do they see themselves; what is the role they are playing in this part of the world? We’re talking about history, really, and historical sensitivities.”

It is a punishing schedule. When we speak he has just returned from Peru, where he signed an agreement about using nuclear techniques for food security, and Brazil, which is building nuclear submarines and pursuing a vigorous civil nuclear power programme (a significant trip, given the history and his own career – “the voice of an Argentine in Brazil is seen with a bit of sympathy, a bit of distrust”, he says).

The day after we speak he is due to fly to Washington to lobby the World Bank to do more to fund nuclear energy projects. He is preparing a visit to Zaporizhzhia, where the IAEA maintains a small group of inspectors in a bid to ensure the place remains safe.

Does he manage to sleep? “Not much,” he shrugs. He has developed techniques for coping over the years. He tries to stay in shape, rising at 5am every day for a run. He doesn’t smoke and drinks only a little (malbec, mostly: wine, he says in a self-consciously Italian flourish, is a very “noble thing” in moderation).

These days he also insists on spending his weekends in Vienna with his wife and their 15-year-old son. “I try to be quite disciplined. I’m ready to squeeze in crazy days in order to try to be able to catch a plane and be with my family. I think I’m quite a hands-on dad. I’m helping to coach his football team.”

That discipline comes partly from bitter experience. Grossi has eight children – six daughters from his first marriage, and a daughter and son with his current wife Cynthia, a fellow Argentine diplomat who works in nuclear non-proliferation.

The strains of front-line diplomacy often force you to prioritise job over family and require an accompanying spouse to sacrifice their own career. It probably played a role in the failure of his first marriage, he says.

Then there are the professional pressures. Lobbying from governments and officials, public pressure from the media, sometimes massive public anger; he recalls facing angry demonstrators in South Korea who were furious about the planned release of water from Japan’s flooded Fukushima nuclear power plant (the plan is to release water gradually into the sea over 30 years – the IAEA insists the process is safe).

And there are other ways people can seek to influence his decisions. “It will not be an ambassador saying, ‘I’m going to put a bullet in your head’. That has not happened. But there are other ways to try to, you know… intimidation, or direct threats. From countries, or from non-state actors.

“For me, it’s a rule of life that if you want to really be part of important processes and influence them, then you will have to withstand whatever comes with it. But it’s not easy. Sometimes you feel very lonely. Sometimes you deal with intelligence and you have lots of doubts…

“There’s historical precedent to confirm that intelligence has been manufactured in different places to influence the decisions of people. To make them believe in some pieces of information which appeared… Very like in a Mission Impossible movie.

“They come with envelopes, photos, with quite impressive things, and perhaps they are not entirely true. So this is where you have to exercise a lot of discretion, cross-checking and prudence.”

As for being spied on, he shrugs. “I know I’m tapped and perhaps this conversation has already been heard by somebody.” Does he have to sweep his plane for bugs before, say, flying to Iran in case someone has decided to listen in? “Some of that,” he says. He adds, rather obliquely, that it is also possible to imagine that “some experts in the agency are people who are being useful in more ways than one… and to many people”.

The IAEA, like other parts of the United Nations system, is only the sum of its parts. And the era in which the United States, Europe, Russia and China could agree on a complex deal to contain Iran’s nuclear programme is dead. There are signs that the nonproliferation regime that has kept the world relatively safe for decades could be going the same way.

But Grossi is not yet ready to throw in the towel. The case of Iran shows just how difficult it is to break out of the non-proliferation regime. “The system is not broken yet. The system is under enormous pressure. I’m talking about the non-proliferation regime and the nuclear world order as we know it.

“The challenges are very big. And this is why I think the work of the IAEA and our activism, if I can put it like this, is essential.

“But I don’t think we have reached the point where we throw our hands up and say, well, God, this is it, we cannot do it anymore. We cannot afford to say that.”

‘I know I’m tapped and perhaps this conversation has been heard by somebody’