U.N. to inspect potential nuclear bomb-making site

VIENNA - Iran has agreed after several months to allow U.N. inspections of a military site where Washington believes work linked to nuclear bomb-making was carried out, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said. The inspection will be part of the U.N. investigation into allegations Iran has carried out work linked to nuclear 'weaponization,' the process of testing or assembling a warhead and attaching it to a delivery system. "We haven't stumbled on any weaponization activities, although we are trying to visit the different sites, including military sites," Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told Reuters in an interview.

"We visited a couple of them in the past and we are going to visit Parchin in the next few days or weeks," he said, adding that he was working out the details of the visit with Iran.

Tehran insists its atomic program is aimed solely at the peaceful generation of electricity. Washington believes Tehran's nuclear energy program is a front to build a bomb.

According to globalsecurity.org, a Web Site run by a private Washington-based research group, the massive Parchin complex, around 30 km south of Tehran, is the center of Iran's munitions industry.

Officials from the United States and several other countries said in September that Parchin may be a site where Iran was testing explosives that would be appropriate for an atom bomb.

Although ElBaradei played down the U.S. allegations at the time, agency inspectors asked Tehran to visit the site. They want to take environmental samples to rule out the possibility that Iran had been working with nuclear materials at Parchin.

But they received no response from Iran until recently. ElBaradei said the key issue is not the weaponization process but the production of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium, materials that can be used to fuel a nuclear bomb.

"For us, nuclear material is the choking point," he said. "If you do not have HEU or plutonium, you do not have a nuclear weapon. You may have been doing computer studies, simulations, but without nuclear material there is no weapon."

This is why it was important for an initiative of the European Union's "big three" - France, Britain and Germany - to succeed, ElBaradei said.

In November, the EU trio revived a stalled agreement under which Iran would freeze its uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing capabilities in exchange for a package of economic and political benefits to be provided by the EU.

Iran and the EU are negotiating the details of the package while Tehran has temporarily frozen all work related to the production of plutonium and enriched uranium.

Diplomats and analysts have said that the U.S. refusal to participate in the EU initiative could wreck the deal.