The Fordow Fuel Enrichment plant is buried underneath a mountain just south of Iran’s Holy City of Qom. When Rafael Grossi , director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, visited in November, he emerged with an acute sense of urgency.
The 64-year-old Argentinian has spent more than a decade trying to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon. At Fordow, Iranian engineers began enriching uranium to just below the level needed for a bomb, after US President Donald Trump withdrew from a key arms-control agreement in 2018. Now, Grossi says, there is a growing debate between different factions in Iran over whether the country may finally need to go further, and build a nuclear deterrent to guarantee its security.