Iranian Minister of Defense General Hossein Dehghan on Saturday said that there was no need for UN nuclear inspectors to pay another visit to Iran’s Parchin military site, where the country is suspected of having tested components used in nuclear weapons.
Dehghan was quoted by the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) news agency as saying the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had already been to the site southeast of Tehran and carried out tests there.
“Besides, they have accepted that nothing happened in Parchin,” he was quoted as saying.
He added that Iran would not make its nuclear scientists available to the inspectors. Tehran has in the past charged the agency with leaking information that led to the assassination of scientists.
Inspectors from the UN nuclear watchdog have visited Parchin in the past, but want to go back. Iran denies that it has ever pursued development of nuclear weapons at Parchin, insisting that it is a conventional military site.
The country has vowed to cooperate with the IAEA as part of talks with world powers aimed at reaching a lasting agreement on its nuclear program. Western nations have long suspected Iran of pursuing a nuclear weapons capability alongside its civilian program and have imposed crippling sanctions, which Iran now hopes to see lifted in exchange for curbing its nuclear activities.
It insists that it has never worked on nuclear arms, describing such allegations as based on false intelligence from Israel, as well as the US and its Western allies.
At the same time, Iran has been guarded about military matters, fearing that information about its conventional capabilities could be leaked to Israel or the US, both of which have threatened to take military action if necessary to prevent it from getting a nuclear weapon.
Earlier this month Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told visiting IAEA Director-General Yukia Amano that Iran’s long-range missile program would not be part of the nuclear talks.
Iran inaugurated a new plant on Saturday to convert a type of uranium into a material that cannot be used to make nuclear weapons, part of an interim accord reached with world powers in November last year, IRNA reported.
The report quoted Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s nuclear agency, as saying that the plant will convert uranium hexafluoride, which can be used to make nuclear weapons and fuel, into uranium dioxide, which can be used only in reactors. The plant is in Isfahan, the report said.
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