WASHINGTON — The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said that Iran has failed to provide the information or access needed to allay the agency’s concerns about the weapons potential of Iran’s nuclear program.
With the deadline nearing for international talks on constraining Iran’s nuclear program, Yukiya Amano, director general of the IAEA, said in an interview that Iran has replied to just one of a dozen queries about “possible military dimensions” of past nuclear activities.
Amano said that Iran has provided only “very limited” information about two other issues while the rest have not been addressed at all.
The IAEA is the nuclear watchdog of the United Nations, and its inspections are considered a key safeguard against countries using civilian nuclear energy technology to produce nuclear weapons. Failure by Iran to comply with IAEA demands would undermine its efforts to win the lifting of U.N. sanctions.
Amano said that the six global powers negotiating with Iran should insist that Iran implement the additional protocol that would allow IAEA inspectors the ability to go anywhere at anytime to examine sites suspected of harboring secret nuclear weapons development.
He said that he spoke to Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif on Feb. 7 in Munich but that Iran has not yet provided the information the agency needs.
Amano met early Tuesday with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. He was scheduled to meet later with President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice.
That additional protocol, Amano said, will be “very much needed. It will give us more powerful tools to look at activities not declared to us.” He said that, in the past, the agency has had two to four inspectors in Iran, but that recently there have been as many as 10.
Iran signed the protocol in December 2003 and initially implemented it, Amano said, but Iran ended its compliance in 2006.
Amano said that near the top of his list of unanswered questions about possible military dimensions of nuclear activities was the Parchin military complex. He said that the IAEA has information that Iran conducted experiments in a high-explosive chamber.
“We would like to have access, and we would like to clarify,” he said. He said Iran had given IAEA inspectors access to the base twice, but he added that Parchin “is a huge area with many buildings.” Now, he said, the IAEA thinks it has identified “the right place to visit,” but its access has been blocked.
