Tehran has handed over ‘N-bomb blueprint’: IAEA

* Confirms processing new batch of uranium

TEHRAN: Iran has handed over a document describing how to make “what could be the explosive core of an atom bomb”, the United Nations atomic agency said in a report on Friday. It added that its inspectors were being blocked from crucial military sites.

The document centres on “procedural requirements for the casting and machining of enriched, natural and depleted uranium metal into hemispherical forms,” said the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report.

“Such a shaping capability has clear nuclear weapons applications” such as holding a bomb’s explosive material, said a Western diplomat. He said the IAEA was “wondering why Iran never informed them about that deeply troubling aspect” of documents which Tehran received in 1987 from an international black market.

Iran said it got the document as part of an offer of nuclear materials and technology but had not asked for such information nor acted upon it, according to the report.

A senior official close to the IAEA said the document “was damaging, but it not a blueprint for a nuclear weapon such as Libya had” from the same black market, which was run by disgraced Pakistan scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. “It only deals with one aspect of making nuclear weapons,” he said.

The official said that the IAEA “doesn’t know exactly what was the purpose of the document, why it was there,” and was evaluating this. The report, which IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei is to present to an agency meeting next week, said Iran is still denying access to sensitive sites and information. “Iran’s full transparency is indispensable and overdue,” said the report.

The report has been sent to the 35 member countries of the IAEA’s board of governors, which is to meet next Thursday to consider whether to refer Iran to the world body.

Separately, Iran confirmed it has resumed converting new quantities of uranium, in a move in defiance of an IAEA resolution to stop such nuclear fuel work.

“We informed the UN watchdog that Iran wanted to process a new batch of uranium and we have started it,” the semi-official Mehr news agency quoted chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani Larijani as saying...