While UN Issues mixed signals, Witkoff exposes Iran's nuclear evasion ‘pride’

The stunning details revealed by Steve Witkoff on his talks with Iran and their boastful remarks about its nuclear program have seemingly fallen on deaf ears at the U.N. nuclear agency.

Days into the U.S.-Israel joint campaign against Iran, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Rafael Grossi posted to X stating, "There has been no evidence of Iran building a nuclear bomb."

Fox News Digital asked the IAEA how it could assess the development of a possible nuclear weapon without access to Iran’s facilities but received no response at press time.

Grossi's post came as the U.S. Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff gave details to Fox News’ Sean Hannity earlier this week on his talks with the regime prior to the U.S. and Israel launching their military operation against Tehran.

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Witkoff revealed the negotiators said they had an "inalienable right" to enrich uranium. When Witkoff countered that the Trump administration had the "inalienable right to stop [them, ]" he explained that the negotiators said this was only their starting point.

"They have 10,000, roughly, kilograms of fissionable material that's broken up into roughly 460 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium, another 1,000 kilograms 20% enriched uranium," Witkoff explained. "They manufacture their own centrifuges to enrich this material, so there's almost no stopping them. They have an endless supply of it. The 60% material can be brought to 90% - that's weapon grade — in roughly one week, maybe 10 days at the outside. The 20% can be brought to weapons grade inside of three to four weeks."

Witkoff added that during his first meeting with the negotiators, they said "with no shame that they controlled 460 kilograms of 60% and they're aware that that could make 11 nuclear bombs, and that was the beginning of this negotiating stance."

"They were proud of it. They were proud that they had evaded all sorts of oversight protocols to get to a place where they could deliver 11 nuclear bombs," Witkoff said.

Grossi, who is running to become the next United Nations secretary general, did however admit in his post on X that Iran maintains "a large stockpile of near-weapons grade enriched uranium" and said that the Islamic Republic has not allowed inspectors full access to its program. With these facts in mind, he said that the IAEA "will not be in a position to provide assurance that Iran’s nuclear programme is exclusively peaceful" until Iran "assists…in resolving the outstanding safeguards issues."

Richard Goldberg, a senior advisor to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, FDD, told Fox News Digital, "No one paid much attention to Rafael Grossi throughout the Biden years when he repeatedly warned publicly that Iran was refusing to cooperate with and providing false statements to the IAEA about ongoing investigations into undeclared facilities, activists and nuclear material."

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The former Trump administration official said, "There are some key facts being ignored today. The IAEA board last year found Iran to be in breach of the NPT. To this day, Grossi has confirmed that the IAEA cannot verify the Iranian nuclear program is peaceful."

He continued, "This is not Iraq where we lacked hard public evidence of a nuclear weapons program. Iran had built out nearly every part of its nuclear weapons program in plain sight, with the weaponization work moving forward at undeclared sites controlled by SPND. If the administration had evidence the regime was moving quickly to reconstitute key elements of that program — from advanced centrifuge manufacturing to completion of a new underground enrichment site alongside advancement of delivery vehicle programs - the president was fully justified in enforcing a red line he set after Operation Midnight Hammer."

Spencer Faragasso, a senior fellow at the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), told Fox News Digital that his organization calculated prior to the June 2025 12 Day War that Iran possessed 440.9 kilograms of 60% rich uranium. With about 24 or 25 kilograms of 90% rich uranium required per weapon, Faragasso said the country possessed the ability to produce 11 weapons in one month.

Faragasso said that there remain questions about whether the Iranians can access their enriched materials, and whether they possess additional centrifuges that may have not been installed in the facilities that were struck.

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"Being able to enrich the uranium up to weapon grade is actually a tall order," he said, explaining that it would require a new enrichment site and components and materials that "Iran would either need to recover from its destroyed facilities" or "illicitly import them from abroad." With a few hundred centrifuges, enough for two or three cascades, Faragasso said the Iranians could have enriched their uranium stores to weapon grade.

"To be clear, the successes gained from the June war are not permanent and officials from the regime spoke publicly about how they wanted to reconstitute their enrichment program, their nuclear program," he said. "The more time that goes on, the worse the situation will get. It’s not going to get better, especially regarding the ballistic missile program."

He said the Iranians had previously expressed the desire to open a fourth enrichment site, which the IAEA stated was at Esfahan. According to Faragasso, there was "never confirmation" of where the site was or how far along construction may have been.

The group is now tracking an Israeli strike on March 3 on Min-Zadayi, a site that Faragasso said "was completely unknown" to them previously. The Israel Defense Forces reported on X that the site was "used by a group of nuclear scientists who operated to develop a key component for nuclear weapons." 

The State Department referred Fox News Digital to remarks made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the press on Tuesday on Iran's nuclear program. 

"This terroristic, radical, cleric-led regime cannot be ever allowed to have nuclear weapons." Explaining that the Islamic Republic was "willing to slaughter their own people in the streets," Rubio directed members of the press to "imagine what they would do to us. Imagine what they would do to others. Under President Trump that will never, ever happen," he said.