Gaps Seen in Iran’s Nuclear Disclosure

The United Nations’ nuclear watchdog said Tuesday that troubling mysteries concerning Iran’s disputed nuclear program remained unresolved, including whether traces of highly enriched uranium at one location indicated a possible weapons program.

In a confidential report, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran had not disclosed the full range of its nuclear activities as it said it had in October. Inspectors have found evidence of previously undisclosed nuclear experiments and secret work on advanced centrifuge machines.

The most serious concerns, the report said, surrounded the origin of traces of highly enriched uranium found at two locations and indications that larger quantities of the fissile material had been removed from one of the sites.

The presence of significant amounts of enriched uranium would be a strong indicator of experiments aimed at developing an atomic weapon, something Iran has denied doing.

In the report, the IAEA praised Tehran for cooperating in some areas, including opening nuclear-related sites on military bases to inspectors and promising to stop assembling centrifuge machines as part of a commitment to suspend its enrichment of uranium.

The IAEA report also confirmed publicly for the first time that Iran and Libya received substantial advanced technology for enriching uranium from the same black-market network of foreign sources.

The report did not identify the origins of the equipment and sensitive designs, but diplomats familiar with its findings said the global network operated by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan provided most of the technology to both countries.

Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the IAEA, has called the network a major international problem. He said in the report that the agency was investigating “the supply routes and sources of such technology and related equipment and nuclear and non-nuclear materials.”

The 13-page document was the latest in a series of IAEA reports detailing a pattern of concealed nuclear activities by Iran, coupled with grudging cooperation. It was issued Tuesday to members of the IAEA governing board. A Western diplomat provided a copy to the Los Angeles Times.

U.S. Accusation

Washington has accused Iran of trying to develop the capability to produce a nuclear weapon, but Tehran has maintained that the program was designed solely to generate electricity.

A senior State Department official said the report provided “incriminating information” that should be discussed at the IAEA Board of Governors meeting next month. Significantly, however, the official did not call for the case to be referred to the U.N. Security Council, a stance that reflected a tactical softening of the administration’s position since last year.

The report, the agency’s fourth since June, is “definitely the most hard-hitting,” with information “that frankly had to be forced out of the Iranians,” the U.S. official said. Iran said its October declaration to the IAEA of its nuclear capabilities, the official said, “was correct and complete, but this information makes it clear that it was neither.”

Libya voluntarily terminated its program in December and acknowledged that it had tried to build a nuclear weapon for more than 20 years.

Khan confessed this month to providing nuclear secrets to Iran and Libya as well as North Korea. Although Pakistan has shared some information about the network with the United States and the IAEA, the report indicated that Islamabad had not yet been completely forthcoming.

Iran, for its part, is concerned about how much information Pakistan has shared with the international agency.

Mohammed Reza Aref, first vice president of Iran, left for Pakistan on Tuesday on what a foreign intelligence agency said was an attempt to discover how much of Khan’s information the Pakistanis had disclosed.

“The Iranians need to know what ammunition has been provided to their rivals regarding their nuclear weapons program and their efforts to conceal it,” said a written analysis prepared by the intelligence agency that was provided to The Times.

Iran and Libya bought nearly identical Pakistani centrifuge designs, but Libya also purchased blueprints for a nuclear warhead and designs to fabricate the device. The IAEA and U.S. intelligence are eager to know whether Iran also bought those plans from Khan’s group

The IAEA report said Iran needed to increase its cooperation to clarify several outstanding issues related to its nuclear program. The agency’s major concern now involves finding the source of traces of highly enriched uranium discovered last year at a pilot plant near the central Iran city of Natanz and at a workshop outside Tehran where Iran had been testing and assembling centrifuges based on a Pakistani design.

Converting Uranium

Centrifuges are used to convert uranium into fuel for nuclear power plants or enrich it to higher levels for use in bombs.

In disclosing new details of the earlier discoveries, the report said recently completed tests showed that the uranium had been enriched to 36%, nearly twice the level normally used to generate electricity but short of weapons quality.

In addition, the level of contamination discovered in a room at Kalaye Electric Co. outside Tehran “suggests the presence of more than just trace quantities of such material,” the IAEA report said.

The Iranians denied inspectors access to Kalaye for several months last year and undertook significant construction at the site, apparently to conceal its nuclear activities.

Once the inspectors were allowed in, tests uncovered evidence of highly enriched uranium. The Iranians then acknowledged that they secretly tested and assembled centrifuges at Kalaye from 1997 to 2002.

Iran has maintained that the traces were from contaminated centrifuge components purchased from a foreign source. Diplomats said IAEA inspectors were confident that the components were shipped from Pakistan by Khan’s network, adding that Pakistan had refused to provide samples of its weapons-grade uranium so tests could determine whether they match.

“Until this matter is satisfactorily resolved, it will be very difficult for the agency to confirm that there has not been any undeclared nuclear material or activities,” the report said.

Concerns also were raised about Iran’s failure to disclose that it had purchased drawings for a more advanced model of the Pakistani centrifuge, called the P2, with the information it gave the IAEA in October.

The IAEA suspected that Iran had received drawings for the more efficient and faster centrifuges after it examined machines Libya had acquired from the network and interviewed former Iranian scientists.

Confronted with the suspicions in January, Iranian officials said they had forgotten to mention the drawings in the October declaration. The IAEA said it found that “difficult to comprehend” because Iran had moved equipment involved in testing the P2 as recently as June.

The report also said that Iran had experimented with manufacturing polonium, a radioactive element that can help trigger a nuclear chain reaction.

The material has civilian uses but “could be used for military purposes, specifically as a neutron initiator in some designs of nuclear weapons,” the report said. The Iranians said the experiments were intended for industrial research and the effort was abandoned a decade ago.

Times staff writer Sonni Efron in Washington contributed to this report.