Iran's offer this week to allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors "full supervision" of its nuclear activities appeared, initially at least, to represent a softening of what for the past two years has been the country's obstructionist posture toward the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog agency.
However, according to James M. Acton, a senior associate with the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the offer was actually made as part of a strategy designed to prevent the IAEA from issuing a resolution condemning Iran's failure to address questions about potentially militarized aspects of its nuclear program.
"The fundamental point here is that the IAEA has put forward a series of questions to Iran to find out whether certain activities in Iran were part of a nuclear weapons program," Acton told Trend Lines this morning. "Iran has point-blank refused to engage with those questions."