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Officials Praise Iranian Openness as Nuclear Deadline Passes
As today’s deadline for Iranian nuclear transparency passed, the top international nuclear inspector tentatively praised Tehran’s cooperation while saying that efforts to verify Iranian disclosures would take months (see GSN, Oct. 30). Iran submitted a report describing its nuclear program to the International Atomic Energy Agency last week after the agency’s Board of Governors set an Oct. 31 deadline (see GSN, Oct. 23). IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei said yesterday that Iran’s nuclear declaration appears to be comprehensive. “I think we are making good progress. Iran has submitted what (it) assured me to be a comprehensive and accurate declaration,” ElBaradei said. “I think I could say that at first glance the report is comprehensive but we still have to do a lot of fine-tuning, we still have to do a lot of questioning, and that is why we are there [in Iran] right now and we will continue to be there doing an inspection for quite a few months in fact,” he added. ElBaradei also said he expects Iran to announce formally next week that it will sign the Additional Protocol to its IAEA safeguards agreement, which would allow the agency to conduct more intrusive monitoring of Iran’s nuclear activities (Reuters/Financial Times, Oct. 31). ElBaradei said Iran has shown greater openness to allowing agency officials to visit its nuclear facilities. “We also have been given access to all the sites that we wanted,” he said (Vanessa Gera, Associated Press/London Guardian, Oct. 31).
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