VIENNA, 14 January 2008 — The UN atomic watchdog said yesterday that it had agreed with Iran a four-week deadline to clear up all remaining issues regarding Tehran’s disputed nuclear activities.
However, Vienna-based diplomats expressed skepticism that Iran would really come clean about its nuclear activities, both past and present, within the new time frame.
In a statement issued after two days of meetings between the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iran, the IAEA said both sides had agreed a four-week deadline to clear up the last outstanding questions.
IAEA Director General Mohamed El-Baradei and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad agreed that the so-called “work plan ... should be completed in the next four weeks,” the agency said.
The “work plan” was a deal struck between Baradei and Tehran last year to deal with unresolved questions regarding Iran’s atomic drive.
The key issues were Iran’s past experiments with plutonium, its use of uranium-enriching P1 and P2 centrifuges, questions about particles of arms-grade enriched uranium found by IAEA inspectors at Tehran’s Technical University, and, most significantly, the possible military applications of the nuclear technology.
Originally, the work plan had envisaged resolving all issues by the end of 2007, but that deadline passed uncommented on by all sides.
In Tehran, the head of Iran’s atomic energy organization Gholam Reza Aghazadeh had told the ISNA news agency that Iran and IAEA had set a deadline for mid-February, in time before Baradei is scheduled to present his new report to the IAEA’s board of governors in March. “We are hoping that all the past and present questions about our dossier will be solved and that we will return to a normal situation,” Aghazadeh said.
Baradei, his deputy Olli Heinonen, and the agency’s head of external relations, Vilmos Cserveny, had been in Tehran on Friday and Saturday, where they met both Khamenei and Ahmadinejad.
“Discussion took place on ways and means to accelerate implementation of safeguards in Iran, as well as additional confidence building measures,” the IAEA said.
“While progress in the implementation of the work plan agreed in August 2007 was noted, an agreement was reached on the time-line for implementation of all the remaining verification issues specified in the work plan. According to the agreed schedule implementation of the work plan should be completed in the next four weeks,” it said.
But Western diplomats were skeptical. Iran had long been aware of which issues were worrying the UN and that it had originally agreed to clear them up by the end of last year, they said.
“So it’s about time it got on with resolving them rather than just stringing the process out,” said a British diplomat, on condition of anonymity.
“Fundamentally, the issue is one of confidence and only by suspending (uranium enrichment) to allow us to enter into negotiations will we be able to work out a long-term solution to provide that confidence,” the diplomat said.
Indeed, the work plan was just one element among others, another Western diplomat said. “It’s one small part. Suspension of enrichment and applying the additional protocol are perhaps even more important,” he said.
Enriched uranium is used to make both nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons and the West has always insisted that Iran suspend its enrichment activities to prove to the international community that its nuclear program is peaceful, as Tehran claims.
Iran insists, however, that it has an inalienable right to develop nuclear power for a growing population and adamantly refuses to suspend enrichment, in defiance of UN Security Council resolutions.
Yesterday’s IAEA statement made no specific mention of the enrichment question. “During the visit, discussion also took place on the importance of the implementation of the Additional Protocol as well as on other confidence building measures called for by the Security Council,” was all it said.
The so-called additional protocol is an agreement that allows unlimited inspections of all nuclear facilities by IAEA inspectors. In addition, Iran had also provided information on its research and development activities on a new generation of centrifuges, the IAEA added. Because Iran has not been able to import P1 and P2 centrifuges for uranium enrichment, it has been working to develop its own designs for a new generation of centrifuges.
