VIENNA, June 15: Iran has admitted to processing plutonium, a potential material for atomic bombs, more recently than it originally reported, according to the draft of a report to be made to the UN nuclear agency. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) ‘has been pursuing with Iran the dates of its plutonium separation experiments’ and Iran has admitted to purifying plutonium in 1998, the text said.
This was a revision of Iran’s previous statement ‘that the experiments were completed in 1993’, according to the draft for a speech to be delivered to the IAEA’s board of governors on Thursday by deputy director for safeguards Pierre Goldschmidt.
A diplomat close to the IAEA said the agency therefore ‘wants to know whether Iran is still processing plutonium’.
“If they lied, then the IAEA knows this has implications. The agency wants to know they’re telling the truth and not making a firecracker,” that is, a nuclear bomb, the diplomat said.
The text outlines areas in which the IAEA is still trying to pin down Iran’s nuclear activities in an investigation that began in Feb 2003.
The IAEA began the probe after discovering that Iran had hidden sensitive nuclear activities for over two decades and amid US charges that Tehran was using its civilian atomic energy program as a cover for weapons development.
The draft for Mr Goldschmidt’s speech also outlines IAEA’s efforts to discover connections to international smuggling in nuclear material and designs arising from a meeting in 1987 between Iranian officials from the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) and a ‘foreign intermediary’ who was offering ‘centrifuge-related design, technology and sample components’.
Centrifuges are used to enrich uranium, which along with plutonium is a raw material for atom bombs.
“The agency has repeatedly, most recently in a letter dated April 14, 2005, asked to have access to, and copies of, the original documentation reflecting the 1987 offer,” the draft text said.
The Iranians said the AEOI had turned down a uranium re-conversion unit, but IAEA inspectors were wondering why ‘contacts (continued to take) . . . place during the period 1987 through 1993 between Iran and the intermediaries’, with ‘design documents on P-1 centrifuges’ being delivered again in connection with a new offer in 1994, according to the text.
A senior Iranian negotiator said on Wednesday that Iran is doing its best to help the IAEA answer key questions about an international black market which, according to Tehran, gave it sensitive nuclear technology.
Iran is working to be as cooperative as possible with the IAEA’s investigation of its nuclear program, particularly in unravelling the workings of the smuggling network, Cyrus Nasseri said.
Reacting to criticism from IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei that Iran has not supplied ‘sufficient’ information on ‘offers of equipment made to Iran’, Mr Nasseri said Tehran was ‘looking to help the IAEA close that issue’.—AFP
