NCRI – Paris – Reports from Vienna and Tehran indicate that talks between the UN nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, and Iranian officials in Tehran have not yielded immediate results.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly sought access to the Parchin military complex to the southwest of the Iranian capital, but Iran has refused, raising suspicions that it is covering up military aspects of its illicit nuclear program.
Reuters is reporting Shashank Joshi, a senior fellow and Middle East specialist at the Royal United Services Institute, as saying: “We have now had so many false starts that there are grounds to be skeptical.”
Western diplomats, who have apparently tired of the Iranian regime’s stonewalling and playing for time in its dealings with the IAEA, are likely to react cautiously and tell Tehran it must engage in substance on the agency’s inquiry and immediately give it the access to sites, officials and documents it needs for its inquiry.
“There will likely be many in Washington and Israel skeptical that this … is anything but a delaying tactic on Iran’s part,” Miles Pomper, senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said based on Reuters report.
Mostafa Dolatyar, a member of Iran’s negotiation team, told reporters at the Iranian embassy in New Delhi on Friday that the talks between Iran and the powers were unlikely to yield results, “Personally speaking, I am not optimistic.”
The opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), the umbrella group that revealed Iran’s illicit nuclear work in 2003, has stated many times that the goal of the Iranian regime in pursuing talks is to buy enough time to build a nuclear bomb which it wants for the survival of its regime in a policy aimed to intimidate and blackmail Iranian society and regional and international players from ever threatening its despotic rule.
