Evidence of possible work on nukes tests Iran's credibility

Iran's nuclear ambitions - and its honesty - are being tested by fresh IAEA findings of undeclared centrifuge designs, components, and past experiments that could be linked to a weapons program.

Iran denies that it is pursuing nuclear weapons. It has accepted snap inspections by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and signed the Additional Protocol of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in December.

But a series of inspections since then has left "discrepancies and unanswered questions," the Director General Mohamed ElBaradei told the IAEA Board of Governors in a confidential report circulated on Tuesday.

"The people who are studying this are getting more and more suspicious," says a Western diplomat in Vienna. Late last year Iran said its declaration was "full and complete, and this raises the question: 'Is this everything?' "

The IAEA has been granted unimpeded access to all civilian and military sites in Iran, the report notes. And on Tuesday - just hours before the report was released and leaked to the press - Iran offered to expand the suspension of its uranium enrichment program.

"Iran was telling the truth all the time ... Inspectors are here to prove this," says Hussein Shariatmadari, a representative of Iran's Supreme Leader, and head of the conservative Kayhan publishing group in Tehran. "The Americans are looking for an excuse to drag our case to the UN Security Council." Any gaps between Iran's declarations and recent IAEA findings are "accidental," says Mr. Shariatmadari.

"There was a lack of coordination between the Foreign Ministry, National Security Council, and the Atomic Energy Ministry," says Abbas Maleki, a former deputy foreign minister who now heads a Caspian Studies institute in Tehran. "Iran wants to show that it is honest, and that it doesn't want to do something against the Tehran Declaration [the watershed nuclear deal Iran signed with Britain, France, and Germany last October]. That is the best way for Iran."

But the IAEA still has questions, especially about how much Iran benefited from a pipeline of black market nuclear technology that originated in Pakistan. Libya received bomb plans from Pakistan, and pursued a nuclear program that the IAEA report says used "very similar" technology "from the same foreign sources" as Iran.

As a signatory to the NPT, Iran has always claimed its right to nuclear technology for power production. US officials have just as strongly alleged that Iran was using its civilian program as a cover to make nuclear weapons.

Revelations from last year about four separate uranium enrichment processes in Iran - which can be used to produce nuclear fuel for energy, or for bombs - sparked US-led IAEA pressure on the Islamic republic to open fully to inspections.

"[Iran's leaders] are trying to become incrementally more transparent, while testing the trust of the US and the EU," says Mohammad Hadi Semati, a Tehran University political scientist, who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "If they can talk honestly with the IAEA, credibility could be restored. But if this pattern continues, it will be a big problem."

"Deep down there is still a consensus, a fundamental commitment [in Tehran] to no nuclear weapons," Mr. Semati says. But there has also been a domestic backlash, which may explain tough rhetoric about limiting the suspension of uranium enrichment programs, and Iran bridling at IAEA rules.

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