IAEA's Grossi: Iran's nuclear facilities buried too deep underground to be hit by 'surgical strike'

"The most sensitive things are half a mile underground — I have been there many times,” says the official. “To get there you take a spiral tunnel down, down, down” Praising the talks between U.S. and Iran as a positive development that could avert a catastrophic war, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s director-general Rafael Mariano Grossi warned that the Islamic Republic has the materials necessary to break out toward a nuclear weapon. “Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapon at this moment, but it has the material,” the official told the Financial Times in an in-depth interview.

Israel’s threat of military action means that “the Iranian thing has incredible potential to become catastrophic," Grossi warned. "If there is a failure in negotiation, this will imply most probably military action.”

Worse still, Grossi said he believed that Iran’s nuclear capabilities could not be destroyed with a single surgical strike. “The most sensitive things are half a mile underground — I have been there many times,” he said. “To get there you take a spiral tunnel down, down, down.”The Iranian mullah regime—which avowedly seeks Israel’s annihilation—has been enriching uranium to levels that have no civilian application, has obstructed international inspectors from checking its nuclear facilities, and has expanded its ballistic missile capabilities, and its officials have increasingly warned that they could pursue the bomb. (Read more)