VIENNA/TEHRAN, 10 June 2006 — A senior Iranian official warned nations yesterday to show “self-restraint” at a high-level meeting of the UN atomic agency next week and not endanger diplomacy over Tehran’s nuclear program. “We expect everybody will have self-restraint,” Iran’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency Ali Asghar Soltanieh told AFP about the meeting starting in Vienna on Monday of the IAEA’s 35-nation board of governors.
His comments came after the IAEA reported Thursday that Iran had accelerated uranium enrichment on the same day this week that six world powers asked it to halt the work and open talks to guarantee it will not make nuclear weapons. Iran stepped up enrichment on June 6 when European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana was in Tehran to present a package of benefits to be discussed if Iran would suspend the work which makes nuclear reactor fuel or in highly refined form atom bomb material, the report said.
On that Tuesday, it said, Iran started feeding the raw material of uranium hexafluoride gas, or UF6, into a connected series of 164 centrifuges — known as a cascade — to produce enriched uranium. Iran yesterday confirmed these facts.
Soltanieh said it was a “coincidence” and not meant as a provocation that Iran restarted crucial enrichment work on the same day that Solana was in Tehran. This was “a matter of coincidence, nothing intentional. The technical people are doing their work. It is just a technical matter,” Soltanieh said.
In Tehran, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati said yesterday that Iran will not stop enriching uranium but is still open to talks on incentives aimed at ending the standoff.
