The IAEA and Iran are "going around in circles" after 10 failed meetings on Tehran's suspected nuclear weapons research, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog said today.
"To be frank, for some time now we have been going around in circles," Yukiya Amano told a closed-door quarterly meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency's board of governors.
"This is not the right way to address issues of such great importance to the international community, including Iran," he said, according to the text of his speech in Vienna.
"We need to achieve concrete results without further delay to restore international confidence in the peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear activities."
In these 10 rounds, the latest on May 15, the IAEA has pressed Iran to grant access to documents, people and sites involved in Tehran's alleged efforts to develop atomic weapons.
Iran says the IAEA's findings are based on faulty intelligence from foreign spy agencies such as the CIA and Israel's Mossad -- intelligence it complains it has not even been allowed to see.
The sites that the agency wants to visit include the Parchin military base near Tehran, where it suspects Iran built a large explosives containment vessel to conduct experiments that the IAEA says would be "strong indicators of possible nuclear weapon development".
The IAEA's chief inspector Herman Nackaerts told a closed-door meeting last week that extensive construction activity spotted by satellite at Parchin meant that the agency may now be unable to find any evidence if its inspectors are ever allowed in.
Parallel negotiations between Iran and six world powers -- the US, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany -- are also stalled following the latest gathering in Almaty, Kazakhstan in early April.
This diplomatic track, on hold until after Iran's June 14 elections, is focused more on Iran's current activities which, as the IAEA's latest quarterly report circulated on May 22 made clear, Iran has continued to expand in spite of UN Security Council resolutions calling for a suspension.
In particular, and despite of sanctions aimed at preventing such advances, it has boosted its capacity to enrich uranium, which in its highly purified form can be used in a nuclear weapon. Iran says it needs the material for power generation and medical isotopes.
