Tehran admits to breaching rules: Iran possesses plutonium, enriched uranium: IAEA
VIENNA, Nov 11: Iran has breached international nuclear accords by secretly making plutonium and enriched uranium but there is no evidence it is trying to build an atomic bomb, the UN’s nuclear watchdog reported.
Meanwhile, a top Iranian official on Tuesday acknowledged the country’s nuclear programme had breached International Atomic Energy Agency rules, but asserted the failures were only minor and were in the past.
The confidential IAEA report was released on Monday ahead of a Nov 20 meeting of the body’s board of governors, which is set to rule on Iran’s nuclear activities after a month-long standoff.
The IAEA said Iran had concealed aspects of its nuclear activities and breached a number of international monitoring agreements, including developing enriched uranium and plutonium — material which can be used to make nuclear bombs.
But the report, made available to AFP (briefly reported in Dawn on Tuesday), credited Iran for having since October “adopted a policy of full disclosure and decided to provide the agency with a full picture of all its nuclear activities.”
At its meeting next week, the 35-nation IAEA board could declare Iran in non-compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a move which could lead to UN sanctions against the Islamic republic.
Diplomats said Iran, which denies making atomic weapons and says its nuclear programme is strictly peaceful, may escape a non-compliance ruling because it has yielded to key IAEA demands over the past month.
On Monday, Tehran’s ambassador to the IAEA Ali Akbar Salehi handed over a letter to agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei pledging to sign an additional protocol to the NPT to allow wider inspections and told him that Iran was as of Tuesday suspending the enrichment programme.
The IAEA report said Iran had “concealed many aspects of its nuclear activities with resulting breaches of its obligation to comply with the provision of the safeguards agreement” of the NPT.
But it said: “There is no evidence that the previously undeclared nuclear material and activities... were related to a nuclear weapons programme.”
“Iran has now acknowledged that it has been developing, for 18 years, a uranium centrifuge enrichment programme and for 12 years, a laser enrichment programme,” the report said, referring to technologies that produce nuclear fuel for reactors but also material for making atomic weapons.
It said Iran made “limited quantities of nuclear material” that “dealt with the most sensitive aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle, including enrichment and reprocessing.”
IRAN’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: “The failures that Iran has been reproached for are minor, and are only in the order of the gram or milligram, while in the past some countries had problems with larger quantities of plutonium,” Mr Salehi, was quoted as saying by state television.
“Failures are a normal thing, and the report of last year (by the IAEA) stated failures by 50 states,” he added.
He said these failures, largely concerning the enrichment of uranium and importation of certain materials, only corresponded to “experiments in laboratories which we should have declared to the agency”.
“Given that these failures correspond to the past, corrective measures have been taken and therefore this matter is closed,” he asserted.
“And taking into account all the information now in the hands of the agency, it is clear that Iran had failed on several occasions and for a long period to meet its safeguard commitments” set out in the NPT, he added.—AFP
