Iran nuke talks going nowhere: UN agency

VIENNA - Agence France-Presse

Iran’s atomic program has been viewed as ‘suspicious’ by the West. AFP photo

The IAEA and Iran are “going around in circles” after 10 failed meetings on Tehran’s suspected nuclear weapons research, the head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said yesterday, adding that no progress had been made towards clarifying concerns.

“To be frank, for some time now we have been going around in circles,” Yukiya Amano told a closed-door quarterly meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) board of governors.

“This is not the right way to address issues of such great importance to the international community, including Iran,” he said, according to the text of his speech in Vienna.

Need for concrete results

“We need to achieve concrete results without further delay to restore international confidence in the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear activities.”

In these 10 rounds, the latest on May 15, the IAEA has pressed Iran to grant access to documents, people and sites involved in Tehran’s alleged efforts to develop atomic weapons.

Iran says the IAEA’s findings are based on faulty intelligence from foreign spy agencies such as the CIA and Israel’s Mossad.

The sites that the agency wants to visit include the Parchin military base near Tehran, where it suspects Iran built a large explosives containment vessel to conduct experiments that the IAEA says would be “strong indicators of possible nuclear weapon development.”