Surprise as China gives IAEA secrets of Iran's nuclear work

Published on Wednesday 2 April 2008 22:19

CHINA, which has opposed harsh United Nations sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme, has provided the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) with intelligence linked to Tehran's alleged attempts to make nuclear arms, it was revealed yesterday.

The move would appear to reflect growing international unease about how honest Iran has been in denying it ever tried to make such arms.

The development was revealed by two senior diplomats who have closely followed the IAEA's investigation of Iran's nuclear programme.

They said Beijing was the most surprising entry on a fairly substantial list of nations recently forwarding information to the agency. Several other countries not normally considered to be in the anti-Iran camp had also done so in the past few weeks.

The diplomats – who did not want to be named because their information was confidential – declined to identify other individual nations. But they attributed a generally increased flow of information to the UN nuclear watchdog to concerns sparked by a presentation to the 35 IAEA board members in February about intelligence previously forwarded by member states on Iran's alleged clandestine nuclear arms programme.

John Bolton, a former United States ambassador to the UN and before that the under-secretary in charge of the Iran nuclear dossier, said any such Chinese move would be "potentially significant" because of Beijing's former military ties to Tehran.

He said the US believed the Chinese had helped Iran develop its nuclear programme, particularly in one area of uranium enrichment, "plus they had co- operation on ballistic missile programmes as well".

One of the diplomats said the IAEA was also on the lookout for misleading information, passed on either inadvertently or in attempts to implicate Iran falsely. One example, he said, was a document showing experiments with implosion technology that can be used to detonate a nuclear device. While the paper seemed genuine, it was unclear whether it had originated from Iran.

A US intelligence estimate last year said Tehran worked on nuclear weapons programmes until 2003, while Israel and other nations say such work continued past that date.