The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization said on Thursday that the International Atomic Energy Agency cannot request inspections until a protocol is drawn up, and that Iran’s nuclear sites have not been secured for inspection because the country remains in a wartime situation.
Understanding what that means requires knowing what the IAEA actually is, what it can compel, and what it cannot. It is a more limited body than its prominence in headlines suggests.
What the IAEA is
The agency was established in 1957 and is based at the Vienna International Centre. It has two jobs that sit awkwardly together: promoting the peaceful use of nuclear technology, and verifying that nuclear material is not diverted to weapons.
The second job is called safeguards, and it is a verification function, not a policing one. The IAEA counts and tracks nuclear material, checks that declared amounts match what is actually present, and reports what it finds. It has no enforcement power. It cannot impose sanctions, order a facility closed, or compel entry.
Safeguards agreements: the legal basis
Inspectors have access because a state has signed an agreement granting it. There is no general right of entry.
Most non-nuclear-weapon states party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty have a Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement, which covers all nuclear material in the country and gives the IAEA access to declared facilities. Many states have additionally signed the Additional Protocol, adopted in the 1990s after the discovery of Iraq’s undeclared programme, which allows short-notice access to a wider range of locations and requires broader declarations.
The distinction matters constantly in Iran coverage. A comprehensive agreement gets inspectors into declared sites. The Additional Protocol is what gets them into places a state has not declared — and it is the instrument states suspend first when relations deteriorate, because suspending it is legal in a way that expelling inspectors outright is not.
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What inspectors actually do
The work is less dramatic than the phrase “nuclear inspection” implies. It is mostly accountancy with instruments.
- Material accountancy. Measuring quantities of nuclear material and reconciling them against the state’s declarations. Discrepancies are the primary signal.
- Containment and surveillance. Tamper-indicating seals on equipment and containers, and cameras that record continuously between visits. If a seal is broken or a camera has a gap, that is itself information.
- Environmental sampling. Swipe samples from surfaces, analysed in laboratories for traces of nuclear material. This is how undeclared activity is most often detected, because particles are extremely hard to remove completely.
- Design information verification. Checking that a facility is physically built the way the state said it was.
Continuity of knowledge is the central concept. Safeguards work by maintaining an unbroken record. Once monitoring is interrupted — cameras off, seals unchecked, inspectors absent — the agency cannot simply resume where it left off. It has to re-establish a baseline, and the gap remains a gap permanently.
What happens when a site has been bombed
This is genuinely unsettled territory, and it is worth being honest that the safeguards system was not designed for it.
Safeguards assume facilities that exist, are intact, and can be entered safely. A struck site raises questions the agreements do not clearly answer: whether the state must provide access to rubble, how material accountancy works when containers may be destroyed or buried, who guarantees inspector safety in an active conflict, and what “continuity of knowledge” even means once a building no longer stands.
A state’s safeguards obligations do not lapse because a facility is damaged. But the practical arrangements for fulfilling them — the protocols Eslami referred to — are negotiated, and a state that wants to delay has considerable room to do so while remaining formally within its commitments.
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The criticism of the agency
Eslami’s complaint — that the agency did not protest attacks on facilities it had itself been inspecting — points at a real structural tension, and it is made from more than one direction.
The agency’s defenders argue that it is a technical verification body, that condemning military action is outside its mandate and would compromise the neutrality on which access depends, and that its Board of Governors, not the Secretariat, is where political positions are taken.
Critics — including some non-aligned states that have made this argument for years, long before the current war — respond that safeguarded facilities are placed under international supervision precisely so they are recognised as peaceful, and that an agency which certifies a site as peaceful and then says nothing when it is struck offers states little incentive to accept supervision at all.
Both positions follow from the same fact: the IAEA depends entirely on state consent, and has no means of protecting the states that give it.
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