IAEA chief: Iran must accept nuclear proposal

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency urged Iran on Wednesday to endorse a plan that would strip it of most of its enriched uranium, saying Tehran could not defuse fears about its nuclear program with proposals that included keeping the material.

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei's comments were his firmest public rejection to date of Iranian attempts to modify a proposal that would involve shipping out around 70 percent of its enriched stockpile and returning it in the form of fuel rods for its Tehran research reactor.

While Iran has offered several counterproposals - buying the rods from abroad or exchanging its enriched uranium in small batches - all have in common Tehran's rejection of exporting most of its enriched uranium.

Iran now has enough enriched uranium for up to two nuclear weapons. If stripped of 70 percent of that material, its ability to make such arms would be delayed for at least a year.

Tehran insists it wants to enrich only to power an envisaged nuclear reactor network. But fears that it could instead turn to making fissile highly enriched uranium for warheads have resulted in UN Security Council demands that it freeze enrichment -and three sets of UN sanctions, shrugged off by Tehran.

"You need the material (out) from Iran to defuse the crisis and open the space for negotiations," ElBaradei told reporters, "Keeping the material in Iran will not lead to that."

His comments dovetailed with the view of six powers endorsing the plan - the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany.

Those same nations planned to mount a new challenge to Tehran this week in the form of a resolution to a 35-nation IAEA board meeting criticizing it for ignoring UN Security Council and IAEA board demands and continuing to build its enrichment program - sometimes clandestinely.

Two diplomats who demanded anonymity because their information was confidential said that by Wednesday, the eve of the board's opening session, close to two-thirds of board members had expressed support for the resolution in private meetings.

Impatience with Iran has been fueled by Tehran's September revelation that it had secretly been building a new enrichment facility. In a possible pre-emptive move, Iran notified the IAEA in a confidential letter only days before the leaders of the U.S. Britain and France went public with the clandestine project.

Iran says it did not violate IAEA statues by waiting with its notification.

But ElBaradei has said Tehran was outside the law in not telling his agency about the facility much earlier. On Wednesday, he said that Iran's secrecy on the facility reduced overall confidence that Tehran is telling the truth when it asserts it is not interested in nuclear arms.

German FM: Nuclear armed Iran is 'unacceptable'

Meanwhile, on Wednesday, Germany's Foreign Minister said nuclear-armed Iran would be unacceptable and patience is limited on finding a solution to a nuclear fuel deal with the Islamic Republic.

Major powers want Iran to accept a UN-brokered deal that would see it ship low-enriched uranium abroad for reprocessing and defuse nuclear tensions with the West.

Iran has yet to give a formal reply.

"We are open to dialogue with Iran and we want to find a solution through dialogue but at the same time ... our patience is not going to last forever," Guido Westerwelle told a joint news conference with Mohamed ElBaradei.

"Frankly, a nuclear-armed Iran is not acceptable," Westerwelle added.

When asked what he meant by limited patience in the context of talks with Iran, Westerwelle said: "I was being serious against the backdrop of sanctions."