Guterres tells the IAEA that attacks on nuclear sites are rising

The International Atomic Energy Agency opened its 70th General Conference at the Vienna International Centre on 14 September with a message from UN Secretary-General António Guterres that dropped the usual ceremonial tone.

Monica Juma, director-general of the UN Office at Vienna and executive director of UNODC, read the text. Guterres said the meeting comes "at a moment of profound global turbulence and uncertainty." Attacks on nuclear facilities are rising. "The drivers of nuclear proliferation are accelerating, while the guardrails against it are falling." He asked member states for full cooperation with the agency on verifying that Iran's programme is peaceful, for support at the Zaporizhzhia plant in Ukraine, and for predictable money for the Technical Cooperation Fund that pays for work in developing countries.

Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi spoke in the same opening session, as did conference president Gustavo Zlauvinen and outgoing president Peter Burian. Grossi stressed that a "common spirit of dedication" still runs through the agency's work even as the political weather around it worsens. The conference runs through 18 September.

What is actually on the agenda

The papers posted for GC(70) are a list of the world's nuclear arguments, not a ceremonial calendar. There is a report on nuclear safety, security and safeguards in Ukraine. There is an item on safeguards in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. There is a request to put "Israeli Nuclear Capabilities" on the agenda. There is a US communication on the transfer of nuclear material under AUKUS and how those transfers sit with NPT safeguards. Iran has already filed a credentials note dated 14 September.

Syria appears in Guterres's text as a recent example of the agency's "indispensable, technical and impartial role" on safeguards. That sentence is there because member states have not treated safeguards as a technical file. They treat them as a vote.

Iran's atomic energy chief was blocked from attending the same conference, according to reporting around the opening day. The agency still has to verify a programme whose political sponsors are at war with the United States and whose inspectors need access that Tehran can grant or stall.

Zaporizhzhia is the live safety case

The plant on the Dnipro has been in the war zone since 2022. Guterres named it in the same breath as Iran. That pairing is the point of the week in Vienna. One file is proliferation. The other is a reactor complex that can still produce a radiological accident if cooling, staffing or shelling goes wrong. The IAEA has kept inspectors on site through rotating missions. Those missions need the conference to keep paying for them.

Guterres also said the world is "on the cusp of a revolution in nuclear power generation" that will need monitoring. New reactors, small modular designs and life-extensions of old plants all land on the same inspectorate that is already stretched across Ukraine, Iran and North Korea.

The 70th conference is an anniversary only in the numbering. The substance is whether member states will fund the Technical Cooperation Fund, seat the next Board of Governors, and keep inspectors in places where armies are moving. The opening speeches said they should. The agenda papers show how many ways that request can be refused.