IRAN: Members of the US administration who advocate confrontation with Tehran are likely to be rubbing their hands in glee today as the UN nuclear agency meets to discuss evidence of Iranian failure to comply with a non-proliferation treaty it has signed.
Widely leaked, a confidential report published earlier this month by the International Atomic Energy Agency describes "the number of failures by Iran to report facilities and activities in a timely matter" as "a matter of concern".
Contacted in Vienna, the IAEA refused to comment on the report until after today's meeting. Non-proliferation experts who have read it, though, say that it concentrates on two main issues.
First, there is Iran's secret acquisition from China of nearly two tons of uranium hexafluoride, a compound used to enrich uranium to a level where it can be used as fuel for nuclear reactors or weapons. The deal between the two countries took place in 1991, but it was only after China admitted earlier this year it had exported the material that Tehran owned up.
Of more concern, though, is the ongoing enlargement of two previously undeclared nuclear facilities in central Iran, one for the enrichment of uranium and the other for the production of heavy water, a material used in the production of plutonium.
In a response to international criticism, Iranian foreign minister Mr Kamal Kharrazi insisted his country had "a security doctrine without nuclear weapons". The atomic bomb, he added, was in total contravention of Islamic practice.
Nuclear weapons experts don't buy that. "The nuclear power plant the Iranians are building at Bushehr does not need heavy water," says Mr George Perkovitch, a non-proliferation expert at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace in Washington. "We saw very similar facilities springing up in other countries that later built the bomb."
Criticisms in the IAEA report were tempered by the acknowledgement that Iran had admitted to past breaches and had begun fully cooperating with the agency, and diplomats today are likely to limit themselves to demanding that Iran sign an additional protocol allowing stringent inspection of undeclared sites.
But hawks in the Bush administration, who have made no secret of the fact they would like to see the back of Iran's religious leaders, have called on the agency to declare Iran in violation of its commitments under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
"That's unlikely to happen, first because Iran does not seem to be in breach of the treaty, second because the credibility of US claims has been dented by exaggerations over Iraq," says Mr David Albright, a former IAEA inspector in Iraq who now heads the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.
Like other non-proliferation experts, he doubts if Washington's fondness for confrontation will solve the crisis. "The important thing is to make sure Iran's trading partners stick to their side of the bargain," he says.
Mr Perkovitch points to another side effect of Washington's aggressive rhetoric. "Iranians saw what happened to Iraq and they're frightened," he says. "Rather than giving them reasons to speed up bomb-building, it is vital to find ground for dialogue. Fast, because Iran's uranium enrichment facilities could be up and running within two years."