On 23 October in Vienna, Iranian Ambassador Ali Salehi provided IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei with a documented declaration of its nuclear programme. A press briefing followed, at which the Director General made a number of points.
“As you know the IAEA Board of Governors called on Iran to fully disclose all of its past nuclear activities.
Today, to that end, Ambassador Salehi provided me with a declaration and he assures me that it is comprehensive and accurate. It is a large set of documents. We need to immediately start our verification activities. It will take us time to go through all of the documents and reconstruct the full history of the programme that goes back to the mid-1980s. We will embark on an intensive verification process and I hope that we can come to a conclusion that we have seen all past nuclear activities and that all nuclear materials and activities are under Agency safeguards.
Ambassador Salehi advised me that in the next few days we should receive a letter from the Islamic Republic of Iran agreeing to the conclusion of an Additional Protocol with the Agency -- this will be a positive step forward.He also informed me of the recent meeting in Tehran of the Foreign Ministers of France, Germany and the UK and the agreement by Iran to suspend enrichment activities. I believe that this decision is an important confidence building measure.
We are in a new phase. I welcome both the decision by Iran to provide what is hopefully a comprehensive and accurate declaration, as well as its decision to conclude an Additional Protocol. The Protocol will enable us to regulate all future nuclear activities in Iran.
I look forward to working with the Iranian authorities in the next few weeks to resolve the outstanding questions and to bring to closure this issue that has been the subject of a good deal of international concern. Our first priority is to analyse the declaration -- to satisfy ourselves that Iran has come clean with regard to all of its past nuclear activities. Our second priority is to conclude the Additional Protocol that will ensure that all of Iran’s nuclear activities are under IAEA safeguards and we have the necessary authority to do a credible job. In doing so, we hope to defuse this crisis through verification and political dialogue.
The Director General will next report to the IAEA Board on nuclear verification in Iran at meetings in Vienna beginning 20 November.
For full coverage, see the pages on IAEA and Iran.