U.N. nuclear agency- North Korea is 'most immediate and serious

VIENNA, Austria -- The U.N. atomic agency's chief called North Korea "the most serious threat" to nuclear proliferation Friday while urging Iran to let inspectors investigate suspect nuclear facilities.

Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he was concerned about reports that North Korea is reprocessing fuel rods.

"We are not there," he said. "We would like to be there."

ElBaradei also pressed Iran for "substantial progress without delay" in clarifying aspects of its nuclear program and in signing an agreement that would let U.N. inspectors conduct in-depth and comprehensive checks of Tehran's nuclear facilities.

Though he said the Vienna-based IAEA has amassed results from its inspections of the Iranian facilities, he denied reports that experts determined that enriched uranium was found in the samples. He described the reports as "pure speculation at this stage."

"There's a lot of analysis we need to discuss, a lot of results with Iran," ElBaradei told The Associated Press.

"We are not in any way ready to come up with a conclusion on that issue before we discuss all the results with the Iranian authorities."

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the United States expects a "full and factual accounting" of the agency's findings in Iran, hopefully "well in advance" of the next scheduled meeting of the IAEA board in early September.

"We have long said that Iran's clandestine nuclear weapon program represents a serious challenge to regional stability, to the entire international community and to the global nonproliferation regime," he said.

Both Iran and North Korea have been characterized by President Bush as part of an "axis of evil," together with Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

The United States wants the agency to declare Iran in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, making it possible to send the matter to the U.N. Security Council for possible action. The council has so far declined to take any action on North Korea.

The North Koreans last week claimed to have finished extracting plutonium -- a key ingredient for nuclear weapons -- from 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods. ElBaradei urged renewed international efforts to pressure North Korea to honor the treaty designed to stop the spread of nuclear weapons.

"In my view, the situation in the DPRK is currently the most immediate and most serious threat to the nuclear nonproliferation regime," ElBaradei said, using the initials for the country's formal name, Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

ElBaradei said, however, that he was "encouraged by some recent efforts on the part of China to restart a dialogue" toward persuading the North to abandon its weapons program.

South Korean news reports say China is pushing for a new round of three-way talks, involving North Korea, the United States and China. The format would be later replaced by five-way multilateral talks that will also include South Korea and Japan, they said.

Chinese Ambassador Zhang Yishan told Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Friday that the recent visit of China's special envoy to North Korea yielded "encouraging results."

The dispute emerged last fall when North Korea reportedly told a top U.S. official it had restarted a nuclear program in violation of a 1994 accord.

The United States and its allies suspended fuel shipments promised under the 1994 deal, and Pyongyang retaliated by expelling U.N. monitors, restarting frozen nuclear facilities and withdrawing from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

North Korea expelled nuclear inspectors from the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency in December, shortly after it dismantled U.N. seals and monitoring cameras installed at the country's nuclear facilities. The facilities had been mothballed under the 1994 agreement.

ElBaradei also said he has urged the international coalition authority administering Iraq to do everything it can to recover up to 22 pounds of uranium compounds looted from the country's main nuclear complex at Tuwaitha.

The IAEA chief said he called upon the coalition authority "to ensure the physical protection of the entire nuclear inventory in Iraq and to make every effort to recover, where possible, the looted material and place it under agency safeguards."

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