The six world powers that have agreed to resume negotiations with Iran over its disputed nuclear program issued a blunt request on Thursday that the Iranians allow international inspectors unfettered access, most notably to Parchin, a large restricted military complex that the inspectors suspect may house a testing chamber for explosives used in atomic weapons triggers.
Herwig Prammer/Reuters
Yukiya Amano, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said his initial optimism about renewed negotiations with Iran had soured because of the Iranian government's refusal so far to allow access to certain sites.
In a joint statement, the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — plus Germany signaled a unified resolve in their renewed negotiations with Iran, which were suspended in frustration more than a year ago. The six agreed this week to Iran’s request to restart negotiations.
Their statement also sent a message of impatience with any possible Iranian attempts to prolong or stall negotiations over the nuclear program. Iran says its program is for purely peaceful purposes, while the West suspects that it is a cover to develop the ability to make nuclear weapons. The dispute has resulted in unprecedented Western economic sanctions on Iran, has raised global oil prices and has stirred fears of a new military conflict in the Middle East if the negotiations fail.
The tone of the statement also suggested that the historic sympathies Iran has received from Russia and China over its nuclear activities have diminished, as Iran has flaunted its increased ability to enrich uranium despite repeated calls for a suspension.
“We call on Iran to enter, without preconditions, into a sustained process of serious dialogue which will produce concrete results,” read the statement, issued at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear monitor, in Vienna.
The statement noted that agency inspectors who had sought and expected access to what they consider “all relevant sites” in Iran during visits in January and February were denied permission, despite Iran’s professed desire to allay their concerns. “In that context we urge Iran to fulfill its undertaking to grant access to Parchin,” the statement said.
Issued by China on behalf of the six powers, the statement did not mention satellite images of Parchin that according to some news reports suggest efforts by the Iranians to cleanse the site before permitting an inspection. Some experts in satellite reconnaissance have discounted those reports, saying it would be impossible to determine such information from the images.
In a further hint of irritation with Iran, however, the agency’s director general, Yukiya Amano, told reporters that his initial optimism after Iran agreed to permit the inspectors to visit had soured, because of what he called Iran’s “old restrictive approach that seeks to tie our hands.”
Mr. Amano said the agency “should be able to do its verification work unhampered.”
“If too many restrictions are placed on the agency, we cannot do our job properly,” he said, saying that Iran had “refused to provide access to the Parchin site during the visits, as repeatedly requested by the agency.”
The Parchin site figured conspicuously in an agency report issued last November on Iran’s nuclear work that significantly raised suspicions about Iranian military motives. The report said Iran had constructed a large containment vessel there in 2000 that was designed to conduct tests on explosives needed to start the kind of reaction that could set off a nuclear bomb. The report said such tests would be “strong indicators of possible weapon development.” Iran has ridiculed that suspicion, asserting that it had allowed inspectors to visit Parchin in 2005. But that visit was heavily monitored and did not include a tour of the containment vessel cited in the agency’s November report.
Since that report, private specialists in satellite imagery have scrutinized the sprawling Parchin complex, on a desert site not far from Tehran.
Paul Brannan, a senior analyst at the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that tracks nuclear proliferation, said he had looked at many images but so far had not found the specific site or signs of any cleanup activity. But he added that the massive scale of development at Parchin made the problem quite challenging. “There’s no way to know whether or not the activity you see in a particular satellite image is cleansing or just regular work,” he said. “They build a lot of stuff. There’s a lot of activity there — always.”
Israel, which feels particularly threatened by Iran, has warned that it may attack suspected nuclear sites there if the Iranians do not stop enriching uranium and prove their assertion that they want nuclear fuel only for peaceful purposes. President Obama, meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel earlier this week, counseled caution, urged the Israelis to give diplomacy and sanctions more time, and castigated Republican critics for what Mr. Obama described as a promoting a drumbeat to war with Iran.
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, criticized Mr. Obama on Thursday for believing that sanctions would pressure Iran into renouncing its nuclear program. But in a highly unusual bit of praise, the ayatollah commended Mr. Obama for asserting that he did not want a war. “Such remarks are good and indicate a step out of delusions,” the ayatollah said in remarks reported by Iran’s PressTV Web site.
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