UN agency: Iran stonewalling nuclear probe

United Nations efforts to investigate claims that Iran tried to make nuclear arms have run into a dead end, with Tehran steadfastly blocking efforts to probe the accusations, the International Atomic Energy Agency said.

The conclusion was contained in an IAEA report released to the 35-nation IAEA board and the UN Security Council, which has already imposed three sets of sanctions because of Tehran’s nuclear defiance.

“We’ve arrived at a gridlock,” said a senior UN official, describing the document as “a progress report without progress”.

The document also said that – through uranium enrichment – Tehran had now amassed a third of the amount of enriched uranium it would need to reprocess into the material serving as the fissile core of a nuclear weapon, should it choose to do so.

The US and its allies say Iran wants to develop its enrichment programme for its weapons applications. But Tehran insists it seeks the technology only to create nuclear fuel and IAEA oversight and inspections of the Islamic Republic’s known enrichment programme has not come up with any evidence that contradict what Tehran says.

The six-page report confirmed that Iran continued to expand its uranium enrichment programme in defiance of three sets of security council sanctions imposed in attempts to force Tehran to mothball such activities.

The document said Iran was now either fully or partially operating nearly 4,000 centrifuges at its cavernous underground facility at Natanz. Beyond those machines, which spin uranium gas into enriched uranium, it was testing 12 more advanced prototypes at its aboveground experimental site at Natanz, a city about 300 miles south of Tehran.

To date, Iran had enriched 480kgs of low enriched uranium suitable for nuclear fuel, the report said. Asked to put that figure into context, UN officials said Tehran would need three times that amount to begin the process of enriching to the level needed to produce a nuclear weapon.

Running smoothly, 3,000 centrifuges could produce enough nuclear material for a bomb within 18 months, were they configured for that function.

Iran’s refusal to end enrichment has been the main trigger for the security council sanctions and continues to be the overriding concern for Washington and others accusing Tehran of wanting to make a bomb.

But with Tehran repeatedly saying it was not planning to stop its enrichment programme – and even giving progress reports on its expansion – the conclusions on enrichment revealed little new. That left the IAEA’s acknowledgement – that it had been stonewalled in months of efforts to shed more light on the allegations of past secret Iranian experiments geared towards developing nuclear arms – the most striking part of the report.

Since its last report in May, “the agency ... has not been able to make any substantive progress”, the document said. It called the impasse a matter of “serious concern”.

If Iran continues to block investigators, the IAEA “will not be able to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran”, the report said.

In Washington, the White House threatened more sanctions if Iran continued to defy the UN

“This report shows once again that Iran is refusing to co-operate with the international community,” said White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe.

But Ali-Ashgar Soltanieh, Iran’s chief delegate to the IAEA, said there was nothing for the agency to investigate as far as weapons programmes were concerned.

“The Americans did a lousy job with the CIA and associated terrorist groups that work with them,” he said, alluding to Iranian claims that the information coming from the Americans pointing to past Iranian weapons programmes was forged.

Intelligence received by the IAEA from the US and other agency board member nations, suggests Iran experimented with an undeclared uranium enrichment programme that was linked to a missile project and drew up blueprints on refitting missiles to allow them to carry nuclear warheads.

The intelligence also suggested Iran was researching construction of an underground site that apparently could be used to test fire nuclear bombs and ordered “dual use” equipment from abroad that could be part of an atomic weapons programme.

Additionally, Iran possesses diagrams showing how to mould uranium metal into the shape of warheads.

US intelligence estimates that Iran conducted such experiments until 2003, but Iran says documents backing them up are fabricated.