UN's ElBaradei Demands Access to Iran Military Site

Reuters, The New York Times:

The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog urged Iran on Tuesday to allow a team of experts to return to a military site called Parchin, which they inspected once but have since been barred from visiting.

"I would ... ask Iran to support the agency's efforts to pursue further its investigation of the Lavizan-Shian and Parchin sites,'' Mohamed ElBaradei said, adding that his inspectors wanted to visit ``areas of interest'' at Parchin.

Parchin, the leading center of Iran's munitions industry, and Lavizan are among the sites where the United States suspects Iranian scientists have conducted research related to the development of nuclear weapons.

Iran says it has no interest in such arms, only in civilian nuclear technology to generate electricity.

Experts from the International Atomic Energy Agencyvisited Parchin earlier this year, but Iran turned down a request for a follow-up visit. The United States believes Iran may have experimented with high explosives appropriate for atomic weapons at Parchin, which is 30 km (19 miles) southeast of Tehran.

A senior Iranian official did not say Iran would reopen Parchin's doors to inspectors but said it was willing to talk.

"We will discuss (Parchin) with them. The door is not closed,'' Sirus Naseri, the head of Iran's delegation at this week's meeting of the IAEA board of governors, told reporters.

ElBaradei said in a speech to the 35-nation IAEA board, he wanted "access to dual-use equipment and other information related to the Lavizan-Shian site.'' The agency began looking a Lavizan last year after the site was razed.

The Iranians have admitted that Lavizan was once a military research and development site but denied conducting any nuclear weapons research there or anywhere else in Iran.

ElBaradei said his deputy, Pierre Goldschmidt, would give the IAEA board more details about the agency's 2-year investigation later this week.

IAEA MAKES SOME PROGRESS, BUT NOT ENOUGH

ElBaradei, who was appointed for a third term on Monday as director-general of the IAEA, said the agency was making progress in resolving one of two key outstanding questions about Iran's nuclear program.

"Last month, the agency received from another member state a number of centrifuge components, on which we have been conducting environmental sampling,'' ElBaradei said in the written text of his speech to the IAEA board of governors.

The "member state'' in question is Pakistan, IAEA officials say. The father of Pakistan's atom bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, sold Iran centrifuges -- machines used to purify uranium to fuel power plants or weapons -- on a global black market that also supplied Libya and possibly North Korea.

A preliminary analysis of Pakistani components for enrichment centrifuges identical to ones Iran purchased from Pakistan appears to back Tehran's assertion that the traces of bomb-grade uranium were the result of contamination, Vienna officials familiar with the IAEA investigation of Iran said.

ElBaradei chided Iran for not providing the IAEA full documentation of its centrifuge program, the second major outstanding issue the agency wants to resolve.

"We have continued to press for additional documentation regarding offers of equipment made to Iran,'' ElBaradei said, adding that what Iran has provided is "not yet sufficient.'' READ MORE