U.S. says Iran deceiving UN over nuclear work

Louis Charbonneau and Francois Murphy, Reuters:

The United States accused Tehran on Thursday of deceiving the U.N. nuclear watchdog about its atomic ambitions and said it would never tolerate an Iran with nuclear bombs. READ MORE

Washington also told North Korea that it would examine "other options" than the stalled six-party talks aimed at ending North Korea's atomic arms programme if Pyongyang failed to return to the negotiating table.

"It is evident that Iran has not come clean about its past or present nuclear activities," U.S. ambassador Jackie Sanders said in the written text of a speech to the governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Washington accuses Iran of seeking nuclear bombs, while Tehran says its nuclear programme is only to generate power.

IAEA deputy chief Pierre Goldschmidt said Iran had admitted to misleading the IAEA about secret experiments in 1998 to create plutonium -- five years later than it had previously acknowledged.

Sanders said: "Iran has also been caught, yet again, misleading the IAEA about its past plutonium separation experiments, claiming until confronted with scientific proof to the contrary that it stopped its undeclared reprocessing experiments in 1993."

The IAEA has never said that these laboratory-scale experiments with plutonium were related to weapons development. But the United States, other countries and nuclear experts say that such work can have little civilian use.

U.S. BACKS EUROPEAN EFFORTS WITH IRAN

Sanders called on Iran to dismantle its uranium enrichment programme and drop plans to a build heavy-water nuclear reactor -- two avenues to nuclear bomb fuel. "We will not accept a nuclear weapons-capable Iran," she said.

France, Britain and Germany have offered Iran incentives to give up its enrichment programme but Tehran's IAEA envoy, Mohammad Mehdi Akhunzadeh, told the IAEA that "nuclear fuel production is a central part of any mutually acceptable agreement."

He said Tehran would make "every effort to arrive at such an agreement" but said the suspension of its enrichment programme could not last forever. "We cannot keep our peaceful nuclear facilities idle for much longer," he said. ...