Superpowers must not guide UN nuke policy: Iran
Foreign Desk Report

TEHRAN—Iran warned Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei on Sunday not to let the policies of the U.N. atomic watchdog be steered by superpowers that want Tehran hauled before the U.N. Security Council. Iran was slow to react to the awarding of this year’s peace prize to ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) which he heads. The IAEA has been investigating U.S. charges that Tehran is seeking nuclear arms.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi, who declined to comment when ElBaradei won the award on Friday, offered guarded praise in Iran’s first official response. “We congratulate Mr ElBaradei ... but he should try not to let the IAEA fall into the hands of the great powers,” he told a news conference. The IAEA has been investigating Iran’s nuclear program for almost three years and last month its 35-member board of governors passed a resolution which could see Tehran’s case referred to the U.N. Security Council for sanctions.
The approved resolution was drafted by countries from the European Union. Iran often accuses rich western nations of flexing political and commercial muscle to put pressure on IAEA board members. Only Venezuela voted for Iran. Tehran says its nuclear program is aimed solely at the peaceful generation of electricity and insists it must be able to produce its own nuclear fuel. Iran has said it will resume a full nuclear fuel cycle and limit U.N. inspections of its atomic facilities if it is referred to the Security Council, which many diplomats expect will happen in November. Tehran has also threatened to review trade ties, particularly in its oil sector, with countries that voted against it at the IAEA board of governors.
The United States has briefed key nations on intelligence that it says shows Iranian atomic weapons work, namely research on getting a missile warhead to explode at an altitude that would maximize the blast of a nuclear explosion, diplomats and analysts told this Agency. However, a non-Western diplomat said the US briefing, carried out in various capitals ahead of a meeting in September of the UN atomic watchdog, “looks plausible but there is no hard evidence,” namely direct proof of a nuclear warhead project.
Iran says its nuclear program is a strictly peaceful effort to develop atomic power in order to generate electricity and rejects US charges that it is secretly developing nuclear weapons. A diplomat close to the Vienna-based watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said that setting a warhead explosion at such a height, which is about 600 metres (yards), the same altitude at which the Hiroshima atomic bomb was detonated, would make sense only for nuclear weapons. Chemical, biological or conventional weapons need to detonate closer to the ground in order to be effective. The intelligence does not indicate whether the weapon the warhead is to hold is nuclear but the United States still considers the data the most important information it has on Iran, diplomats said.
The intelligence, the existence of which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal in March, contains diagnostic test information on putting a package, a so-called black box, inside the cone of the medium-range Shahab-3 ballistic missile, a diplomat told. It consists of extensive Farsi-language computer files and reports. US officials are confident the data is genuine, diplomats said, even though some analysts have criticized it as unreliable since it is believed to come from only one source. US officials in Vienna refused to comment on the matter. A diplomat said that, according to the briefings, Iranian research was done from 2001-2003 at a semi-government owned industrial group that works on the Shahab missile and which was on a project commissioned by the elite Revolutionary Guards military.