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Thursday, June 10, 2004
Iran: U.S. Nuke Concerns Due to Misunderstandings
June 10, 2004
Reuters
Louis Charbonneau
VIENNA -- A senior Iranian official dismissed U.S. concerns over Tehran's nuclear program as misunderstandings on Thursday after the U.N. nuclear watchdog held a closed-door meeting.
A diplomat at the meeting said the Iranian delegation had told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) board that Tehran was cooperating fully with the agency's inspectors.
But Pierre Goldschmidt, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei's deputy and head of the inspection program, "corrected the Iranians for the record... He said cooperation had not been 100 percent," said the diplomat, declining to be named.
The United States accuses Iran of using its atomic energy program as a front to build nuclear weapons. Tehran denies this, saying its ambitions are limited to the peaceful generation of electricity.
"The U.S. has some misunderstandings about our nuclear program which we corrected," senior Iranian Foreign Ministry official Amir Zamaninia told reporters after a briefing for the 35 states on the IAEA board and Iran.
Zamaninia said the United States had two misunderstandings -- on Iran's advanced P-2 centrifuges capable of making bomb-grade uranium and the origin of enriched uranium traces U.N. inspectors had found in Iran.
"VERY GOOD MEETING"
"It was a very good meeting," Zamaninia said. "It was technical, not political."
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna, Kenneth Brill, said it was no misunderstanding and the IAEA report showed Iran had misinformed the U.N. about its P-2 program.
"I did not hear anything that corrected (what the IAEA wrote in its report)...although I did hear an effort to try to explain it away," said Brill.
"Many states, including the United States, believe that Iran is trying to hide a program they don't want brought to light."
The IAEA said last week in a report on Iran that it still did not know the full extent of Tehran's P-2 program. It also said Iran's statements the uranium traces resulted from used contaminated machinery bought from Pakistan were not plausible.
Tehran has said the two issues were minor and would soon be cleared up so Iran would be off the IAEA board's agenda as a special case as soon as possible. But diplomats said they were not minor and Iran would be under investigation for some time.
"The IAEA made it clear that it's impossible to say when the Iranian nuclear file can be closed," said a Western diplomat at the meeting who declined to be identified.
Zamaninia declined to comment on a draft IAEA board resolution circulated earlier this week by France, Germany and Britain that sharply criticized Iran for not fully cooperating with U.N. investigations.
"It's only a draft," he said, adding Iran would insist on some revisions to the text before it is formally presented to the board next week.
The IAEA has been investigating Iran's nuclear program since August 2002, when an exiled Iranian opposition group said Tehran was hiding an underground uranium enrichment plant at Natanz and other sites from U.N. inspectors.
link to original article
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