Posted on 12/28/2003 9:58:56 AM PST by Pan_Yans Wife
Pakistani scientists may have played a major role in advancing Iran's nuclear program, but more than a half-dozen other countries are now being drawn into the UN investigation, diplomats and arms experts say.
A month-long probe by the International Atomic Energy Agency has traced the origins of Iran's program to the late 1980s, when Iran was supplied with the first drawings on centrifuge technology, its main way of enriching uranium - leading to suspicions it was developing nuclear weapons.
The investigations have widened "well beyond" Pakistan, Russia and China to include companies in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and other West European countries, said one diplomat.
There are no UN or other international sanctions against Iran that would have prevented foreign companies from providing equipment that could be used in a nuclear program. But investigating companies yielded useful information when the world body investigated Iraq's weapons programs in the early 1990s.
One of those diplomats, talking on condition of anonymity, also linked Pakistan to North Korea's weapons program, saying U.S. intelligence had "pretty convincing" evidence of such a connection.
Iran and North Korea are the key concerns of the Vienna-based UN atomic agency, whose main task is to curb weapons proliferation through inspections and monitoring of countries that have ratified the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. North Korea withdrew from that treaty after the Bush administration confronted Pyongyang about its nuclear program late last year.
After months of intense international pressure, Iran now is cooperating with IAEA efforts to unravel nearly two decades of covert activities that the United States and other countries say point to a weapons program.
Iran insists its nuclear activities are peaceful. But suspicions have heightened with revelations that it was enriching uranium, and the discovery of traces of weapons-grade enriched uranium on some of its centrifuge equipment.
A diplomat said the agency was following up on three to four different samples of highly enriched uranium - beyond the two whose existence had been previously revealed.
The agency is trying to trace the origins of the equipment to test Iranian claims that Tehran did not enrich uranium to weapons grade and that the highly enriched traces were inadvertently "imported" on the components.
Neither Iran nor the IAEA have revealed the countries of origin, but diplomats had previously told the AP that Pakistan, China and Russia were among the probable suppliers.
Russia has acknowledged signing a contract with Iran in the mid-1990s to deliver equipment that could be used for laser enrichment of uranium, but officials in Moscow say the contract was canceled several years later in response to U.S. pressure in the initial stages of the program.
Pakistan, itself a nuclear power, acknowledged Tuesday that several of its nuclear scientists may have shared sensitive technology with Iran, but insisted the government never authorized it. Officials said information provided by the IAEA prompted the questioning of some scientists.
Pakistan has long been suspected of proliferation during its 30-year effort to build nuclear weapons - of sending nuclear technology to North Korea in exchange for missiles, or helping Libya and Iraq.
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