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Thursday, March 31, 2005

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  Iran's president, Mohammad Khatami, led the tour on Wednesday of the underground facility at Natanz.

Ereli said the Iranians should be answering questions from the International Atomic Energy Agency about what the work going on at Natanz and elsewhere in the country.

"If Iran were really serious about allaying the concerns of the international community, they would stop denying IAEA full and unrestricted access to suspicious sites like the Parchin high-explosive facility," he said at a department briefing.

"They would tell the truth about their Lavasan facility before they bulldozed it to the ground. They would talk openly or answer openly questions about past plutonium separation experiments," he said.

The United States says Iran may be testing high-explosive components for nuclear weapons, using an inert core of depleted uranium at Parchin as a dry run for a bomb that would use fissile material.

Lavasan is a suburb north of Tehran, Iran's capital, where outside experts say equipment was shipped to a suspected nuclear plant that could be put to either military or civilian use.

Iran insists its nuclear program is for generation of electricity only.

During the tour of the Natanz site, journalists were denied access to the plant's string of centrifuges, the core of the process of enriching radioactive material, which can produce fuel for either power generation or weapons.

Only recently has President Bush agreed to give inspections by U.N. experts a chance. A lack of results, however, could mean efforts to pass legislation in the U.N. Security Council to punish Iran. Britain, France and Germany are in talks with the Iranians in hopes of persuading Tehran to scrap its uranium enrichment program.

"We're on the same page with the Europeans in terms of where we want these talks to lead, and what we hope these talks will achieve," Ereli said.

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