Iran: Ready for Next Step in Pullback from JCPOA

Tehran is ready to take a fourth step away from the constraints demanded by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a 2015 multilateral nuclear agreement, and reduce access to its nuclear facilities by international inspectors. “[W]e will probably impose limits on inspections, which means that the International Atomic Energy Agency’s surveillance on Iran’s nuclear activities will be reduced,” Hossein Naghavi Hosseini, the spokesman for the Iranian parliament’s National Security Committee, told the Mehr news agency earlier this week. Iran’s previous three steps – begun this past summer in response to heavy economic sanctions imposed by the Trump Administration, which called the nuclear deal inadequate and pulled out in 2018 – involved surpassing limits on uranium enrichment, stockpile size and the use of advanced centrifuges for enrichment. Just this month, the IAEA, the UN’s nuclear watchdog, said Iran had boosted cooperation with its inspectors.