Iran Says IAEA Nuclear Talks Were `Positive`

Iran says its nuclear programme is a peaceful drive to produce electricity.

Iran gave an upbeat assessment on Tuesday of two days of talks with the top investigator of the U.N. atomic energy watchdog, who was looking into Western reports that Iran secretly studied how to design nuclear bombs.

"The talks with (Olli) Heinonen were positive," a senior Iranian nuclear official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters.

Iranian officials had said Heinonen's visit was intended to advance cooperation between Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. body investigating Iran's disputed nuclear ambitions.

Iran says its nuclear programme is a peaceful drive to produce electricity so that the world's fourth-largest crude exporter can sell more of its oil and gas abroad.

But it has failed to convince the West, which believes Tehran is seeking technology so it can build atomic weapons.

U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown last week vowed to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb, possibly by expanding sanctions.

The U.N. Security Council has imposed three sets of limited sanctions on Iran since 2006 because of its inadequate cooperation with IAEA investigations.

Heinonen raised a diplomatic stir in February with a presentation that indicated links in Iran between projects to process uranium, test explosives and modify a missile cone in a way suitable for a nuclear warhead.

Iran has dismissed the intelligence as baseless, forged or irrelevant. But the IAEA wants substantive explanations to enable it to wind up a long inquiry into Iran's secretive quest for nuclear power.

IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei has said the world "needs to make sure Iran did not have a weapons programme".

IAEA officials stress that the intelligence details about weapons studies, many of them from a laptop computer spirited out of Iran by a defector in 2004 and handed to the United States, remain unverified but warrant thorough investigation.