VIENNA, 11 November 2003 — The UN nuclear watchdog will say in a new report that it has found no signs of a secret atomic weapons program in Iran, diplomats said yesterday.

“They don’t have any indications of a weapons program,” a Western diplomat, who follows the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) closely, told Reuters.

In Moscow, Iran told Russia it was temporarily suspending its disputed uranium enrichment program from yesterday and was giving a letter to the IAEA agreeing to sign a more intrusive inspection regime under the Additional Protocol.

“I officially announce that today we are giving to the IAEA a letter agreeing with the additional protocol. From today we are temporarily suspending our process of uranium enrichment,” Hassan Rohani, head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, told Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The United States, which labeled Iran a member of an “axis of evil” with North Korea and pre-war Iraq, accuses Iran of using its nuclear energy program as a front for developing an atomic weapon. Tehran vehemently denies this accusation. “If Iran’s intentions are peaceful, why did it engage in a long-term pattern of... violations and evasions regarding a number of its nuclear activities,” US ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna, Kenneth Brill, said in June.

The latest findings of IAEA inspectors will be detailed in a report on Iran that IAEA chief Mohamed El-Baradei will send out to diplomats on the 35-nation Board of Governors this week.

In a declaration to the IAEA on its nuclear program before an Oct. 31 deadline, Iran acknowledged not telling the United Nations about all its activities. Another Western diplomat said: “We are not expecting any serious omissions. But we are not expecting the new report to be conclusive. It will say that more work needs to be done to reach a conclusion on this and that.”

Two previous IAEA reports on Iran in June and August listed repeated failure by Iran to declare nuclear facilities and activities to the UN agency as required under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which Tehran signed in 1970.