VIENNA (Reuters) ? Senior U.N. nuclear inspectors plan another trip to Iran soon after holding what both sides described as "good" talks about suspicions that the Islamic Republic is seeking the means to develop atomic weapons.
The talks represented rare direct dialogue in the protracted international stand-off over Iran's nuclear activity. Tension has worsened in recent weeks with the West pursuing a punitive embargo on Iranian oil and Tehran threatening retaliation.
Led by the International Atomic Energy Agency's global head of inspections, the IAEA team returned on Wednesday from three days of talks in Iran to try to end three years of deadlock in efforts to resolve questions about Tehran's nuclear work.
Tehran says its uranium enrichment program is solely for peaceful electricity generation and has repeatedly dismissed allegations of weapons aims as baseless and forged.
The fact both sides said talks would resume hinted that the round just completed at least created some basis for progress.
"We are committed to resolve all the outstanding issues and the Iranians said they are committed too. But of course there is still a lot of work to be done and so we have planned another trip in the very near future," Herman Nackaerts, IAEA deputy director general in charge of nuclear non-proliferation safeguards, told reporters after returning from Tehran.
Asked if he was satisfied with the talks, Nackaerts, who headed a six-member mission, said: "Yeah, we had a good trip."
He described the talks as "intensive discussions" but declined to comment on whether his Iranian counterparts had engaged in substantial dialogue or to give any more details, saying he first needed to brief his boss.
A Western diplomat based in Vienna, the IAEA's headquarters, said that meant the jury was still out on whether the mission accomplished anything concrete. "What we want to know the answer to is did Iran cooperate on substance here," the diplomat said.
Proliferation expert Mark Fitzpatrick described Nackaerts' statement after the trip about more meetings as a positive sign.
"The IAEA would not be scheduling another trip unless they had an expectation of progress in clearing away at least some of the questions about suspicious past nuclear activity," Fitzpatrick, a director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said.
In Tehran, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi also said more talks would be needed but did not say when.
"We had very good meetings and we planned to continue these negotiations ... the team had some questions about the claimed studies ... one step has been taken forward," he told the semi- official Fars news agency in Tehran on Wednesday.
IAEA BOARD MEETING
By "studies," Salehi was alluding to intelligence reports indicating that Iran has covertly researched ways to design a nuclear weapon -- Western allegations that were backed up by a detailed IAEA report in November.
Salehi added: "We were ready to show them our nuclear facilities, but they didn't ask for it." Lower-level IAEA inspectors based in Iran have regular, if limited, access to Iran's declared nuclear installations.
Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, had already announced Iran's readiness to hold talks with major world powers and would issue a written invitation, Salehi added. "I hope this meeting takes place in the not too distant future," he said.
Western diplomats have often accused Iran of using offers of dialogue as a stalling tactic while it presses ahead with stockpiling enriched uranium, the key energy source in nuclear power plants or bombs, depending on the level of refinement.
They say they doubt whether Tehran will show the kind of concrete cooperation the IAEA wants.
Mark Hibbs of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said the IAEA needed a "significant deliverable" to prevent the crisis from escalating at a meeting of the U.N. nuclear watchdog's 35-nation governing board in early March.
"Nackaerts will soon tell member states whether he came back with that or whether he's close. Without the deliverable, next month we're headed for more pressure and more sanctions," Hibbs said.
Friction between Iran and the West has worsened markedly this year after the United States and the European Union imposed sanctions targeting Tehran's vital oil sector over its continued defiance of U.N. resolutions demanding it suspend enrichment, granted unfettered access to the IAEA and engage in negotiations addressing doubts about the nature of its nuclear activity.
The Islamic Republic has been open to resuming talks with six world powers frozen for over a year, but only to discussing broader international issues, not its nuclear program.
The new Western measures take direct aim at the ability of OPEC's second-biggest oil exporter to sell its crude.
Iran has rejected the oil sanctions as "psychological warfare" and threatened to cut off oil exports to EU countries before July 1, when the sanctions would take full effect.
Iranian officials have shrugged off the impact of sanctions, saying their country has become more self-reliant.
Top U.S. intelligence chiefs told legislators in testimony on Tuesday that Iran is feeling the bite from sanctions and that its nuclear program is now capable of yielding a weapon although Tehran had not yet decided on such a course.
(Additional reporting by Fredrik Dahl in Vienna, Tabassum Zakaria in Washington and Ramin Mostafavi in Tehran; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/un/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120201/wl_nm/us_iran_iaea
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