The U.S. Wants Iran to Open Its Bombed Nuclear Sites — and Account for the Uranium Nobody Can Find

The United States, working with European allies, has circulated a draft resolution to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Board of Governors that demands Iran do something it has refused to do for nearly a year: tell the world’s nuclear watchdog what happened to the uranium buried inside its bombed nuclear facilities. The text, seen by Reuters and reported by The Jerusalem Post, was circulated ahead of the 35-nation board’s quarterly meeting beginning June 8, 2026.

At the center of the standoff is a number: 440.9 kilograms of uranium enriched to up to 60 percent — a short technical step from the roughly 90 percent purity of weapons-grade material, and, by the IAEA’s own benchmarks, enough for as many as ten nuclear weapons if Iran chose to refine it further. That was the last figure agency inspectors were able to verify, in February 2026. Since then, they have seen nothing.

For 97 days, by the count of Director General Rafael Grossi’s June 4 report, no IAEA inspector has set foot in any Iranian nuclear facility — struck or intact. Iran disabled the agency’s surveillance cameras, removed its seals, and evacuated its monitors on February 28, 2026. The U.S. resolution is an attempt to force the blackout to end. Whether it can is another question entirely.

• 440.9 kg — of uranium enriched to up to 60% that Iran held when Israel first struck — enough, by IAEA benchmarks, for as many as 10 weapons if refined to weapons grade · Source: IAEA report GOV/2026/8 · Reuters
• 97 days — with zero IAEA inspector access to any Iranian nuclear facility as of the June 2026 Board session · Source: IAEA Director General report, June 4, 2026
• 35 nations — on the IAEA Board of Governors weighing the U.S.-drafted resolution at its quarterly meeting beginning June 8 · Source: IAEA / Reuters

The U.S.-drafted text, circulated to board members before this week’s session, makes three core demands. It calls on Iran to fulfill its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty; to provide the agency with “precise information on nuclear material accountancy and safeguarded nuclear facilities in Iran”; and to “grant the Agency all access it requires to verify this information” without delay. The draft describes both the information and the access as “essential and urgent.”

This is not the board’s first attempt. A resolution adopted in November 2025 — passed 19 votes to 3, with 12 abstentions, Russia, China, and Niger opposed — already demanded that Iran account for its damaged sites and the enriched uranium stored at them. Iran has not complied. The June draft is, in effect, the board repeating itself with more urgency, now that the monitoring gap has stretched past three months.

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The facilities at issue are the three pillars of Iran’s enrichment program, all struck in the June 2025 war — the U.S. Operation Midnight Hammer and Israeli strikes — and hit again in early 2026. At Natanz, post-attack analysis by the Institute for Science and International Security estimated the above-ground centrifuge halls suffered 70 to 80 percent destruction. Fordow, carved roughly 80 meters into a mountain, and the tunnel complex at Isfahan, by contrast, are assessed to be “largely intact” — which is precisely the problem.

What survives underground is what the IAEA cannot see. Grossi has said much of Iran’s enriched uranium was probably moved to Isfahan before the strikes; satellite imagery analysts noted transport casks arriving at the complex in the days beforehand. But under mounds of rubble, with no inspectors and no cameras, the agency has “no means of confirming what it contains.”

“The Agency's loss of continuity of knowledge over all previously declared nuclear material at affected facilities in Iran needs to be addressed with the utmost urgency.”

IAEA Director General report on Iran · June 2026

The phrase the agency keeps returning to is “continuity of knowledge.” Safeguards work because inspectors verify material on a recurring schedule — highly enriched uranium is supposed to be checked roughly every month. When that chain breaks, the agency cannot simply pick up where it left off; it loses the ability to say with confidence that the material it last counted is still where it was, in the quantity it was. As of the June report, the last verified ledger showed 440.9 kg enriched to up to 60 percent, alongside thousands of kilograms of lower-enriched uranium.

Iran is the only non-nuclear-weapon state party to the NPT ever to produce uranium at 60 percent. The agency has been blunt that it can no longer verify whether enrichment has resumed, whether the stockpile has moved, or whether it remains buried at the struck sites at all. “We haven’t been able to inspect or to reject that the material is there and that the seals — the IAEA seals — remain there,” Grossi has said.

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Rafael Grossi, the Argentine diplomat who has run the IAEA since 2019, has spent the months since the strikes pressing a single point: verification, not speculation, is what keeps a nuclear crisis from becoming a nuclear catastrophe. He has warned that any deal struck on the basis of guesswork would be a bad one. “Something that is not verifiable will lead to a bad agreement,” he told Bloomberg.

The blackout he is describing is total. Since February 28, 2026, Iran has granted zero inspector access to any nuclear site — not the bombed enrichment plants, not the undamaged research reactors. The agency’s cameras are dark and its seals are gone. Grossi has acknowledged that a great deal of Iran’s nuclear capability “survived” the strikes, even as he stresses that survival does not mean Iran has built, or is building, a weapon.

“Something that is not verifiable will lead to a bad agreement.”

Rafael Grossi, IAEA Director General · to Bloomberg

Tehran has met each resolution the same way: by escalating. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi declared that the November 2025 resolution had “killed” the so-called Cairo understanding — an interim arrangement Grossi had negotiated with Egyptian mediation to restore limited monitoring — and treated it as terminated. Iran has cast the IAEA as a “political tool for the West” and directed its anger at Grossi personally rather than at the questions his inspectors keep asking.

The geopolitics on the board work in Tehran’s favor. Russia and China have voted against every Iran-related censure resolution since 2022, and Moscow’s envoy to the IAEA, Mikhail Ulyanov, has argued that a new resolution would only “antagonise Iran.” Even if the U.S. draft passes, the board cannot compel access; its power is to put a demand and a vote on the record. The risk, by Iran’s own pattern, is that the resolution prompts Tehran to cooperate less, not more.

Strip away the diplomatic language and the stakes are simple. A quantity of near-weapons-grade uranium that the IAEA judges sufficient for roughly ten bombs is, as far as the agency can prove, missing from view — not necessarily moved or weaponized, but unaccounted for, which under safeguards is its own kind of alarm. The strikes degraded Iran’s ability to enrich; they did not resolve the question of what Iran already had.

The U.S. resolution is the legal and diplomatic instrument for forcing that question into the open. President Trump has said he wants the highly enriched uranium removed and Iran’s path to a weapon permanently closed. Iran says its program is peaceful and refuses the access that would let anyone confirm it. Between those positions sits a verification gap that no resolution, by itself, can close — and a stockpile that, for now, the world is simply being asked to take on faith.

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Last updated June 7, 2026