VIENNA, 1 March 2005 — The head of the UN nuclear watchdog said yesterday Iran must be more forthcoming with inspectors probing its nuclear program, which the United States says is a front for developing an atomic bomb.

Mohamed El-Baradei was speaking as the board of governors of his International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) met one day after Iran’s nuclear planners scored a major victory with a key uranium fuel supply deal with Russia.

“In view of the past undeclared nature of significant aspects of Iran’s nuclear program, a confidence deficit has been created and it is therefore essential that Iran works closely with the agency in a proactive manner,” El-Baradei said in a speech to the IAEA board.

“In some cases, the receipt of information is still pending, which in turn delays our work,” he said.

El-Baradei told reporters he welcomed an Iranian decision to show the IAEA a 1987 offer from aides to Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist and atomic black marketeer, Abdul Qadeer Khan, to supply nuclear equipment.

He said the written offer was for centrifuges used to produce enriched-uranium fuel - a revelation that several Western board members said deepened their suspicions about Iran’s program.

“They indicated that they did not take these people up on the entirety of the offer,” El-Baradei said.

El-Baradei said the agency had been able to verify Tehran’s suspension of activities connected with uranium enrichment, a process of purifying uranium for use as fuel for nuclear power plants or, when very highly enriched, in weapons.

In Moscow, Russia’s nuclear energy chief, Alexander Rumyantsev, shrugged off US concerns that a nuclear fuel supply deal he signed with Iran at the weekend could help Tehran with any covert weapons plans.

“This agreement enhances international security in terms of preventing the proliferation of nuclear materials,” he told reporters.

US Republican Sen. John McCain, an influential member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Washington should seek to bar Russia from this year’s G-8 summit of major nations to protest against Moscow’s actions including the fuel deal.

A spokeswoman for the European Commission said in Brussels the EU did not want a nuclear-armed Iran but had never questioned Tehran’s right to civilian atomic technology. The IAEA’s 35-member board was not expected to pass any resolutions this week that would condemn Iran or refer it to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions, diplomats said.

The European Union has demanded Iran make the suspension permanent if it is to get access to economic and political incentives including telecommunications and aircraft deals and possible membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Iranian officials meet next month with officials from Britain, France and Germany for a new round of nuclear talks.

‘Egypt Not a Proliferation Threat’

Egypt is not a nuclear proliferation threat El-Baradei said as he prepared to submit a report on the country’s nuclear program to the IAEA.

Egypt has failed to report some sensitive nuclear activities but “we haven’t seen a proliferation concern yet,” El-Baradei told reporters ahead of a meeting of the IAEA’s 35-nation board of governors.

The report says that Egypt was guilty of repeated failures to report nuclear activities but downplayed any suggestion this could be related to secret atomic weapons development, according to a copy obtained by AFP earlier this month.

The IAEA also found traces of plutonium, a potential atomic weapons material, in “hot cells” used to handle radioactive material, the report says, with Egypt saying this was due to contamination rather than plutonium production. The report says Egypt’s failures to comply with international nuclear safeguards agreements, including not reporting the building of a plutonium reprocessing facility, were “a matter of concern” but that Cairo was now cooperating and had claimed it had erred as it had not understood its reporting obligations.

The IAEA board decides whether to take nations that violate safeguards to the Security Council but this is unlikely for Egypt as its reporting failures were in some cases decades ago and Cairo has been forthcoming about them. Egyptian Ambassador Ramzy Ezzeldin Ramzy told AFP that the IAEA report “puts to rest the unnecessary and unwarranted speculation that has been in the press for some time . . . all of these experiments are consistent with the NPT (nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty).”