VIENNA (AFP) – The UN nuclear watchdog is to issue a report Wednesday expected to show Iran continuing to defy UN demands that it stop enriching uranium and open the door to new sanctions against Tehran.
International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei will be reporting to the 35 nations of his board of governors as required by a UN Security Council resolution of March 24 that had imposed a second round of sanctions after a first round levied last December, an IAEA official said.
A diplomat in Vienna who spoke on condition of anonymity said the report should have "no surprises and everything in it will be negative for Iran."
Non-proliferation expert Gary Samore said from New York that "obviously the bottom line is that they haven’t accepted a suspension of enrichment. That’s all the Security Council needs to take further sanctions."
The IAEA board meets in June to review the report and this is expected to lead to a new Security Council meeting on Iran.
The United States meanwhile is seeking to protest directly to ElBaradei for saying Iran should be allowed to keep some uranium enrichment, diplomats told AFP.
ElBaradei has said in recent newspaper interviews that the international community must deal realistically with the fact that Iran has attained the knowledge of enrichment, the strategic process that makes fuel for civilian nuclear reactors but can also produce the explosive core of atom bombs.
A diplomat said US ambassador Gregory Schulte wants, possibly along with ambassadors from US allies France and Britain, "to speak to ElBaradei and complain" at IAEA headquarters in Vienna.
Both US and IAEA officials refused to comment.
The United States leads Western nations in insisting that Iran freeze all enrichment work in order to start talks on trade, security and technology benefits in return for Tehran guaranteeing it will not seek nuclear weapons.
Iran refuses to abandon enrichment as it says it needs to produce fuel for nuclear reactors to eventually produce electricity.
Some diplomats have been talking about a possible compromise in which Iran would be allowed to continue research into enrichment, at a time of diplomatic initiatives by both the United States and the European Union with Tehran.
Iranian and US officials are meeting in Baghdad next week over Iraq, although other issues could be discussed.
And European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana is to meet on May 31, perhaps in Madrid, with Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani to discuss the crisis over enrichment.
ElBaradei told The New York Times on May 15 that Iran has progressed in its enrichment work, as it not only defies UN resolutions but expands its enrichment capacity.
"From a proliferation perspective, the fact of the matter is that one of the purposes of suspension (of uranium enrichment) — keeping them from getting the knowledge — has been overtaken by events," he said.
ElBaradei said "the focus should be to stop them from going to industrial scale production," rather than expecting the Iranians to stop all enrichment.
A diplomat told AFP on May 15 that the Iranians had 1,600 centrifuges running at an underground, bunkered plant in Natanz, although not all at full speed, and were installing "cascades" of 164 centrifuges at the rate of one cascade about every 10 days.
Iran wants to get 3,000 centrifuges functioning, which could produce enough enriched uranium in a year for an atom bomb.
Schulte told a university seminar last week in Vienna that "we (the United States) think they still haven’t fully mastered the technology and we see no interest in allowing Iran to master this technology."
A diplomat who closely follows the Iranian program said Iran had not mastered enrichment yet.
"They still have problems, a main one being to run the centrifuges for a long, long period," the diplomat said. Centrifuges spin rotors at supersonic speeds to enrich uranium.
