LONDON – As Western governments reaffirmed their will to report Iran and its nuclear program to the U.N. Security Council, Tehran lashed back Tuesday with a warning that such a move would mean “diplomacy is over.”
Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, speaking on Iranian television, said his country would feel free to resume nuclear-related work and would rebuff U.N. inspections if the board of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency pushed the Iran case before the council.
Larijani made his statement even as news services carried a report of a confidential IAEA document that alleged a range of violations of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by Iran. Those revelations, contained in a report expected to be presented to the IAEA, boost suspicions that Iran was involved in a bid to acquire nuclear weapons.
Among other things, the report said, Iran recently has shown IAEA inspectors a 15-page document that details how to cast “enriched, natural and depleted uranium metal into hemispherical forms” for the manufacture of “nuclear weapons components,” according to an Associated Press report from Vienna, Austria.
The document, which Iran said it acquired unintentionally in a black-market transaction, has been put under an IAEA seal, the report said.
The IAEA board of governors is expected to approve a resolution to report Iran to the U.N. Security Council at a special meeting Thursday and Friday.
The five permanent members of the Security Council – the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China – announced early Tuesday that they had agreed that the IAEA board should send the council a detailed outline of Iran’s failure to comply with IAEA requirements.
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