West drops IAEA governors move on Iran after row

By Mark Heinrich and Karin Strohecker

VIENNA (Reuters) - European powers on Tuesday dropped a bid to have U.N. nuclear watchdog governors heap pressure on Iran over its atomic work after objections by Russia, China and developing nations, Western diplomats said.

Opponents felt a resolution against Iran would be superfluous a day after the U.N. Security Council toughened sanctions on Iran and could provoke a resentful Tehran to cut, not increase, cooperation with U.N. inspectors, they said.

"The board doesn't need to compete with the Security Council," said an Asian diplomat on the 35-nation governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Almost half the governors are from developing nations.

Britain, France and Germany scrapped the resolution after concluding their goals had been achieved by the Security Council and there was no point risking a schism among U.N. nuclear policymakers Iran might exploit, Western diplomats added.

"Iran thought it could manipulate the IAEA to avoid a Security Council resolution while moving forward to develop its uranium enrichment capability," Gregory Schulte, U.S. ambassador to the Vienna-based IAEA, told reporters.

"As the resolution adopted yesterday in New York shows, Iran clearly failed. In fact what the resolution does from a Vienna perspective is to underscore that Iran's file remains open and to fully support the IAEA in its continuing investigation of outstanding issues, particularly with respect to weaponisation."

Iran has pursued a uranium-enrichment program it says is meant only to generate electricity. But its history of nuclear secrecy and continued curbs on IAEA inspections stoke fears it could turn enrichment technology to yielding nuclear arms.

OVERWHELMING SANCTIONS VOTE

In imposing more far-reaching sanctions by a 14-0 vote, the Security Council cited Iran's defiance of demands to suspend enrichment, failure to fully explain past nuclear activity and continued restrictions on IAEA inspections.

Last week the IAEA's chief of non-proliferation safeguards presented to board diplomats detailed intelligence suggesting Iran has tried to "weaponise" nuclear materials.

He revealed diagrams, slides and video, much of them from a laptop spirited out of Iran by a defector, indicating administrative links between projects to process uranium, test high explosives and modify a missile cone for a nuclear payload.

IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei, opening the weeklong governors session on Monday, prodded Iran to cooperate with the agency inquiry into the allegations, signaling the IAEA would not take Tehran's flat denials for a final answer.

Iran's IAEA ambassador repeated on Tuesday that Tehran would have nothing more to do with the inquiry and would never suspend its nuclear program, but would keep its declared enrichment sites under IAEA monitoring despite the new sanctions.

Ali Asghar Soltanieh noted ElBaradei had certified Iran had resolved six outstanding questions about its past nuclear activity and said purported arms studies did not count because they were "fabrications" of Iran's chief foe, the United States.

"The alleged studies were thoroughly reviewed in two rounds of talks and we gave our final assessment. The issue is over," he told reporters invited to a slide presentation held to counter the IAEA one last week.