The UN nuclear watchdog hopes Iran has "come clean" on its nuclear programme so a long probe into it can be wound up in the next few months, its chief Mohamed ElBaradei said on Sunday.
ElBaradei said he hoped a second dossier Tehran gave the International Atomic Energy Agency - after its first report was found to be incomplete - was now the full picture of the programme that the United States believes aims to build nuclear weapons.
"Iran needs to accelerate its co-operation," ElBaradei said at a symposium in the eastern French resort of Talloires on Lake Annecy.
"They have a legal obligation to come clean," he said.
"I would hope it's a matter of months that we should be able to bring these issues to closure."
The United States accused Tehran last week of refusing to co-operate fully with IAEA inspectors in what its ambassador to the agency, Kenneth Brill, called "a long-term pattern of denial and deception that can only be designed to mask Iran's military nuclear program."
Iran's Supreme National Security Council Secretary General Hassan Rohani challenged Washington to produce hard evidence Tehran was trying to build a nuclear bomb.
"It's clear they have nothing," Rohani said last week.
ElBaradei said he was "not sure we have any concrete proof" that Iran planned to build a bomb and said the IAEA still needed to know more about its uranium enrichment programme.
But the fact that Iran had clearly been trying to master the full gamut of nuclear fuel cycle technology amounted to "a deterrence of sorts," he said at the symposium, run by the Boston-based Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
IAEA inspections of Iran's nuclear programme will have been going on for two years in September and Tehran's second dossier, which it received last week, would take several months to assess, ElBaradei said.
"The international community is getting impatient. The process cannot go on forever," he said.
"We need the active accelerated co-operation of Iran to bring this issue to closure as soon as possible."
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