By Francois Murphy

VIENNA, Reuters – Iran on Thursday dealt a serious blow to the chances of reviving 2015 Iran nuclear agreement. It began removing essentially all International Atomic Energy Agency monitoring devices under the deal.

Iran warned of retaliation in the event that the IAEA’s 35 member countries Board of Governors passes a resolution by France, Britain, Germany and the United States criticizing Tehran for failing to adequately explain the uranium trace evidence found at undeclared locations. A crushing majority approved the resolution late Thursday.

Iran informed IAEA overnight it would remove 27 IAEA cameras as well as other equipment by Thursday. It was “basically all of” additional equipment that Iran had installed in violation of the 2015 Iran-IAEA deal, Grossi stated at a brief press conference.

Grossi stated that there is still time to reinstate some monitoring. Otherwise, the IAEA may lose its ability to reconstruct all, or almost all, Iran’s nuclear activities and materials.

Grossi expressed concern about the consequences of not acting within that time window.

Talks between Iran and America on revising the 2015 accord are in jeopardy and have been suspended since March.

Donald Trump, then President, pulled Washington from the agreement and imposed new sanctions on Tehran in 2018. Iran has violated the limits of its nuclear activities and used more sophisticated centrifuges, enriched uranium, and increased its stockpile of enriched Uranium since.

Although the West warns Iran that it’s getting closer to making nuclear bombs, Iran insists they are not.

Iran, as part its erosion of nuclear agreements, had held on to data collected by extra monitoring equipment from February 2013. The IAEA can only wish it will have access at a later time. Grossi indicated that the future of those data was unknown.

He said, however that 40 IAEA camera would still be operating as part the core monitoring of Iran’s activities pre-2015 deal.