VIENNA, 9 September 2003 — The head of the UN nuclear watchdog urged Iran yesterday to answer all remaining questions about its nuclear program, which Washington says is a front for making an atomic bomb.
Speaking to reporters ahead of a week-long, closed-door session of the governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), agency chief Mohamed El-Baradei demanded transparency and total cooperation from Iran.
“I’m going to strongly urge Iran to clarify all issues relevant to its (uranium) enrichment program to make sure that all its enrichment activities have been declared and (are) under agency verification,” El-Baradei said before the meeting began.
“It is absolutely essential for Iran to cooperate actively and... demonstrate full transparency with the IAEA as early as possible,” he said. Enrichment is a process of purifying uranium to make it usable in nuclear fuel, or when highly enriched, in weapons.
An IAEA report last month said traces of weapons-grade enriched uranium were found at an enrichment plant in Iran. Tehran blames the particles on contaminated components it purchased abroad on the black market in the 1980s.
El-Baradei’s comments would appear to support a US-sponsored resolution demanding “urgent and essential cooperation” from Tehran as IAEA inspectors attempt to get a complete picture of Iran’s nuclear program.
Due to a lack of support on the 35-nation board, US officials for now have dropped plans to urge the board to report Iran to the UN Security Council for non-compliance with its obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Diplomats told Reuters that Washington appeared to have enough support on the board to pass instead a softened resolution this week demanding Iran enable IAEA inspectors to get to the bottom of Tehran’s nuclear program.
A non-Western diplomat told Reuters that his country and a number of others had decided to back the new US proposal because it was “an incentive resolution” aimed at giving Iran a chance to prove it was not secretly making weapons.
The diplomat also said that Iran has been sending emissaries to many of Vienna’s diplomatic missions to convince them that its failure to answer the IAEA’s open questions is due to “poor accounting” and not because it wants an atom bomb. “We think this could be possible, so Iran should get a chance to prove it’s true,” said the diplomat.
