Iran Wants To Continue IAEA Talks

Iran is calling for continued talks with inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran’s representative to the IAEA announced today.

Reuters reports that Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s ambassador to the UN nuclear watchdog, has said: “Our position is that we are going to continue the talks for cooperation with the agency and we hope that this process will be successfully going on.”

The upbeat statement by Soltanieh was in contrast to the report delivered by the IAEA inspectors after a two-day visit.

The IAEA announced that no further trip to Iran is currently on its agenda.

A high-ranking delegation from the IAEA visited Iran this week, but the two-day visit was concluded without any breakthroughs. A previous three-day visit in January also yielded no specific results.

The inspectors expected to hold talks with Iranian nuclear scientists and visit the Parchin Military Base, which is used for high-impact explosions; however, neither task was accomplished on this trip.

Yukiya Amano, the head of the IAEA, expressed disappointment that the Iranian authorities refused to let the inspectors visit the Parchin Military Base on their recent trips.

Soltanieh told Reuters: “We need a quiet environment, a calm environment to continue our professional work with the agency.”

Western suspicions about Iran’s nuclear activities have been stoked by the country’s recent dealings with the IAEA.

But Iran’s ambassador to the IAEA maintained: “We try to be cooperative. We are dealing with the questions and we are trying to remove ambiguities.”

Iran insists that its nuclear program is peaceful and has no military dimension.