TEHRAN, 26 February 2004 — Iran said yesterday it had told the United Nations enough about its nuclear program and had no obligation to say more, rebuffing calls for it to be more open and dispel suspicions it is building a nuclear bomb.

“Iran has given enough answers to the agency’s questions,” Hassan Rohani, head of Supreme National Security Council and Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, was quoted as saying by the official news agency IRNA.

On Tuesday the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s nuclear watchdog body, said Iran had continued to hide from it technology and research that could be linked to a weapons program — despite its declaration in October that it had no more secrets to divulge.

“We have other research projects which we haven’t announced to the agency and we don’t think it is necessary to announce to the agency,” Rohani said. The IRNA report gave no details on the kinds of projects he was referring to.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hamid Reza Asefi, said in a statement that outstanding IAEA concerns about Tehran’s nuclear program were “purely procedural” and did not undermine Iran’s denials that it is pursuing atomic arms.

IAEA chief Mohamed El-Baradei said on Tuesday Tehran’s failure to disclose sensitive research in its October declaration was a “setback” and said he wanted to see “much more prompt” information coming from the Islamic republic.

“I hope this will be the last time any aspect of the program has not been declared to us,” El-Baradei said during a flight from the Libyan capital Tripoli to Rome. However, he praised Iran’s overall cooperation and its decision to suspend all activities related to the enrichment of uranium. The IAEA said Iran had failed to declare designs and parts for advanced “P2” centrifuges, which can produce material for nuclear weapons, as well as experiments with polonium-210, a substance that can help trigger a chain reaction in a bomb.

Rohani took issue with El-Baradei’s view of the P2 issue, saying Iran was not obliged to report the centrifuge research.

On the subject of polonium, Asefi said the issue had been misunderstood and misrepresented by the media. “What was published about an unfinished research work 13 years ago about polonium is only a misunderstanding which will be solved soon.”

The United States predicted there would be more revelations about Iran’s nuclear program.

The P2 centrifuges are probably “the tip of an iceberg of a larger and more advanced program in Iran,” a US official said. “If the IAEA keeps looking, it will find that.” But several diplomats in Vienna told Reuters they doubted the quality of some US intelligence on Iran.

“Remember that it wasn’t the CIA or MI6 that uncovered the Iranian enrichment program, it was the NCRI,” said a diplomat close to the IAEA, referring to the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a coalition of exiled opposition groups that Washington considers a terrorist organization.

In August 2002, the NCRI broke the news about the massive underground uranium enrichment facility Iran was constructing at Natanz but had failed to declare to the IAEA.

The IAEA said inspections of Libya’s arms program, which Tripoli agreed in December to dismantle under IAEA supervision, are helping it understand Iran’s program. Tuesday’s report said: “The basic technology (in Iran and Libya) is very similar and was largely obtained from the same foreign sources.”