Iran stonewalling, report says
VIENNA, Austria – Iran is defying international demands to halt uranium enrichment and divulge all aspects of its nuclear program, including whether its military was involved in what may have been nuclear warhead-design work, a U.N. nuclear agency report Monday says.
Unless Iran cooperates, U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency investigators may never be able to determine whether its program is strictly for peaceful purposes, as it claims, the report says.
“Although the Agency has not seen any diversion of nuclear material to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices, the Agency is not at this point in time in a position to conclude that there are no undeclared nuclear materials or activities in Iran,” says the report, by IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei.
The report was certain to bolster the United States and its European allies in their drive to have the U.N. Security Council step up pressure on Iran to halt its uranium enrichment work and accept restraints that guarantee that it can’t develop nuclear weapons.
Enrichment is the process that produces low-enriched uranium for power plants and highly enriched uranium for nuclear bombs.
ElBaradei delivered the confidential report to the 35 nations that sit on the IAEA board of governors before a meeting next Monday. Knight Ridder obtained a copy.
The board voted Feb. 4 to report Tehran to the Security Council, which has the power to impose sanctions. But it agreed at the insistence of Russia and China, which have major commercial and political ties with Iran, to allow a month for diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis.
Talks between Russia and Iran over the weekend appeared to make no major progress on a proposal to have Russia host a joint venture that would produce low-enriched uranium for Iranian power plants.
State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said in Washington that he wasn’t aware of any deal.
Iran says it has the right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the cornerstone safeguard of the global system designed to halt the spread of nuclear weapons.
Tehran admits that it hid its program from the IAEA for 18 years, including technology and know-how purchased from a Pakistani-led international smuggling ring.
ElBaradei’s 11-page report offered no evidence substantiating U.S. and European charges that Iran’s program is a cover for a military-run nuclear weapons project. But it calls “regrettable, and a matter of concern, that … uncertainties related to the scope and nature of Iran’s nuclear program have not been clarified” after three years of investigation.
Of greatest concern, the report says, is the “inadequacy” of information on Iran’s work with centrifuges, devices that spin uranium hexafluoride gas into enriched uranium. Another top concern was a document purchased from the smuggling ring outlining procedures for machining uranium metal into the explosive spherical core of a nuclear warhead.
It says Iran also has failed to clarify “the role of the military in Iran’s nuclear program, including … information available to the Agency concerning alleged weapons studies that could involve nuclear material.”