Iran keeping nuke deal, U.N. says

U.S. pull-out not affecting compliance, monitors report

VIENNA — The U.N.’s nuclear monitoring agency said Monday that Iran is abiding by the deal reached in 2015 with major powers that aimed to prevent Tehran from building atomic weapons in exchange for economic incentives.

In a confidential quarterly report distributed to member states and reviewed by The Associated Press, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran has been abiding with key limitations set in the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

The issue has grown more complicated since the U.S. withdrew unilaterally in May from the deal and then re-imposed sanctions. Iran’s economy has been struggling ever since, and its currency has plummeted in value.

The other signatories to the deal — Germany, Britain, France, Russia and China — are continuing to try to make the deal work. A reactor upgrade promised under the nuclear deal is also continuing with U.S. acquiescence.

“The U.S. has left just enough breathing room to continue implementing the JCPOA from a technical level,” Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said by phone on Monday, using an acronym to refer to the deal with Iran. “What we will see for at least the next couple months is continued compliance as Iran assesses the new cost-benefit analysis of staying in the deal.”

In the report, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency said the agency had access to all sites in Iran that it needed to visit in snap inspections, and that inspectors confirmed Iran has kept within limits of heavy water and low-enriched uranium stockpiles.

“Timely and proactive cooperation by Iran in providing such access facilitates implementation of the additional protocol and enhances confidence,” the report stated, referring to the procedure detailing safeguards and tools for verification.

The agency says it has installed automated, real-time enrichment monitoring in Iran that records, measures and stores changes in activity.

In its last quarterly report in August, the agency also concluded Iran had stayed within key limitations set by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

A senior diplomat, who was speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t officially allowed to discuss the report, said that “there’s nothing that indicates that Iran’s cooperation or Iran’s attitude has changed since November 5.”

On that date, the U.S. re-imposed oil and banking sanctions on Iran that were lifted under the 2015 deal, but it also granted waivers to eight countries, including Japan and Turkey, to continue buying Iranian petroleum products without penalty for another six months.

The latest batch of U.S. sanctions severely affects Iran’s oil industry, the major source of the country’s foreign revenue. Tehran officials worry that OPEC and non-OPEC countries such as Russia will increase their production to fill the gap in response.

Although the U.S. has conceded that Iran is meeting its nuclear obligations under the accord, officials accuse Tehran’s government of continuing its ballistic missile program and of meddling in Middle Eastern conflicts from Syria to Yemen.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s board of governors will convene Nov. 22 in Vienna to deliberate the latest findings.

Information for this article was contributed by Kiyoko Metzler of The Associated Press; and by Jonathan Tirone of Bloomberg News.