The UN nuclear agency made no progress in a year-long push to find out if Iran worked on developing an atomic bomb, its chief said on Thursday, calling for urgent efforts to end Tehran's stand-off with the West. Yukiya Amano said he would not give up seeking to end what Western diplomats describe as Iranian stonewalling of the agency's investigation into possible military dimensions to the Islamic state's nuclear programme.
UN inspectors will meet Iranian officials for a new round of talks in Tehran next month to seek an agreement to allow the agency to resume its inquiry, after several meetings since January failed to achieve a breakthrough.
"Now is the time for all of us to work with a sense of urgency and seize the opportunity for a diplomatic solution," Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told its 35-nation governing board. Iran rejects suspicions it is on a covert quest for atomic bomb capability.
But its refusal to curb nuclear work with both civilian and military applications, and its lack of openness with the IAEA, have drawn tough Western sanctions and a threat of pre-emptive military strikes by Israel. A year ago, the IAEA published a report with a trove of intelligence indicating past, and some possibly continuing, research in Iran that could be relevant for nuclear weapons. They included suspected high-explosive experiments at the Parchin military site south-east of Tehran, and possible work on designing a device to produce a burst of neutrons for setting off a fission chain reaction.
The UN agency, whose mission is preventing the spread of nuclear weapons in the world, has since tried to gain access to Iranian sites, officials and documents it says it needs for the inquiry. "I am unable to report any progress on clarifying the issues relating to possible military dimensions to Iran's nuclear programme," Amano said, in a frank statement to the agency's policy-making body in Vienna.