Vice President JD Vance said on Monday that Iran had agreed to invite nuclear inspectors back into the country after the first round of direct talks in Switzerland to turn a preliminary cease-fire agreement into a lasting peace deal.
But Iran’s foreign ministry said that it had made no new commitments, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog, did not comment on Mr. Vance’s claim that its inspectors would soon be able to resume operations in the country.
“That is a major milestone for the American people and the first step in permanently ending a nuclear weapons program in Iran,” Mr. Vance said at a news conference in Switzerland shortly after Iran’s most senior negotiators left that country. Tehran has blocked the inspectors from getting access to its nuclear facilities since last June, when Israel and the United States attacked many of those sites during a 12-day war.
The preliminary agreement said that Iran had agreed to let the energy agency supervise the “down-blending” of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. But ahead of the talks in Switzerland, Iranian officials had said the negotiations would focus on ensuring a cease-fire was put in place between Israel and Hezbollah, the Iran-backed armed group in Lebanon, preparing mechanisms for continuing the talks, releasing Iran’s frozen assets and ensuring maritime traffic continued through the strategic Strait of Hormuz.
The fate of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium has been unknown since the 12-day war. Iran says the material was destroyed or buried in the bombings, but analysts have warned that Iran may have become interested in secretly developing an nuclear weapon since those attacks.
Rafael Grossi, the energy agency’s director general, traveled to the Swiss resort of Bürgenstock, where the talks were held, to meet with Switzerland’s foreign minister. But Iran denied that its officials had held any discussions with Mr. Grossi.
Tensions have been high between Iran and the U.N. agency — and especially with Mr. Grossi — since the war last June.
Israel attacked Iran a day after the U.N. watchdog passed a resolution saying that Tehran was not complying with its nuclear nonproliferation obligations, prompting Iranian officials to say that the agency had provided political cover for the strikes.
The Iranian authorities had for years allowed the U.N. agency to monitor its nuclear sites as part of the 2015 international nuclear agreement struck by the Obama administration and other global powers. President Trump withdrew from the accord three years later, after repeatedly criticizing it as a bad deal for U.S. national security.
Late last year, Iran and the U.N. agency attempted to reach a new deal to reinstate international inspections. Those efforts never got off the ground, however, as Tehran insisted that, for security reasons, it could not allow inspectors access to the sites that Israel and the United States had bombed.
At the time, Mr. Grossi said his agency believed that most of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium had survived the war. But its status was unclear, he added, without further inspections.
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