Nuclear talks with Iran stall over access to sites

New York Times — After a brief spurt of optimism, impetus toward resolving the nuclear dispute with Iran slowed further Friday as senior inspectors from the U.N. nuclear watchdog said they made “no progress” toward gaining access to restricted sites they suspect of being used to test potential triggers for nuclear warheads.

The assessment came after a day of talks at the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna led by Herman Nackaerts, the agency's chief nuclear inspector, and Ali Asghar Soltanieh, the Iranian ambassador to the body.

Coming after inconclusive, broader negotiations between Iran and world powers on its disputed nuclear program in Baghdad last month, the outcome of Friday's encounter suggested that momentum had been further diminished, even as Tehran faces an array of more onerous economic sanctions on its oil and banking sectors next month.

The outcome seemed likely to deepen suspicions among Iran's critics that Tehran is using its contacts with outsiders to buy time as it continues nuclear enrichment efforts and possibly conceals evidence sought by international inspectors.

The IAEA inspectors had been hoping to secure Iran's agreement to what they call a “structured approach” permitting scrutiny of sites that they suspect of having military uses, IAEA officials said. After a visit to Tehran in May, the IAEA director general, Yukiya Amano, said he believed Iran was close to agreeing the terms of an inspection of contentious sites, including one at Parchin, 20 miles south of Tehran.

In a statement Friday, Nackaerts said his negotiators arrived at the meeting with Soltanieh in a “constructive spirit,” hoping to finalize an agreement.

“We presented a revised draft which addressed Iran's earlier stated concerns,” Nackaerts said. “However, there has been no progress and, indeed, Iran raised issues that we have already discussed and added new ones. This is disappointing.”

Soltanieh, the Iranian representative, sought to portray the discussions in a more positive way, saying that after eight hours of negotiations, the talks would continue at an unspecified date “in order to finalize the particularities of the talks and reach a conclusion,” Iran's official Islamic Republic News Agency reported. It quoted him as saying that “because the talks concern a very sensitive and complicated subject, all dimensions of the talks must be reviewed carefully by our team.”