Iran leader to back U.N. nuclear probe

Monday, August 18, 2014

VIENNA — Iran’s president has promised to back a United Nations probe into suspicions that the country secretly worked on nuclear arms, the U.N.’s chief nuclear inspector said Sunday after talks in Tehran.

Yukiya Amano of the International Atomic Energy Agency described the meetings as “useful.” Still, it was unclear whether his agency would be able to make much progress by next Monday— the deadline agreed on by the two sides to advance the energy agency’s investigation that essentially has been stalled for seven years.

Amano said Sunday’s talks with President Hassan Rouhani resulted in Iran’s “firm commitment … to resolve all present and past issues” — a euphemism for the energy agency’s investigation.

But he offered no specifics, and it was clear that stubborn differences remained.

The optimistic note came a day after two diplomats said that the probe was deadlocked.

As part of step-by-step concessions, Iran agreed in May to cooperate with an agency investigation of suspicions that it experimented with high explosives that can be used to set off a nuclear charge, and that it modeled a nuclear warhead from uranium metal.

But the diplomats — who are familiar with the investigation but demanded anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss it — said that since then, Iranian officials had ignored repeated energy agency requests for information.

Amano’s trip was meant to kick-start the stalled probe, they said.

Iran’s official IRNA news agency cited the country’s nuclear agency chief, Ali Akbar Salehi, as urging Amano to close the books on allegations that Iran also tested detonators as part of nuclear weapons experiments. But Amano said in a statement that his agency was not yet ready to do so, even while acknowledging that such detonators could be used in the oil industry, as Tehran claims.