TEHRAN, Aug. 31 (Xinhua) -- Iran's Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi said Friday that the recent report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Iran's Parchin Military Base lacks "technical significance," the semi-official ISNA news agency reported.
An IAEA report said Thursday that Iran has expanded its potential capacity to refine uranium in an underground site by doubling its centrifuges from 1,064 to 2,140 and it has cleansed another site where the agency suspected the country had conducted explosive experiments linked to production of nuclear weapons.
Referring to the Parchin Military Base in suburban Tehran, the agency said the cleanup would "significantly hamper" the ability of its inspectors to understand what kind of work had taken place there.
The UN nuclear watchdog urged Iran to immediately open the Parchin Military Base to UN inspectors to clarify its nuclear program.
Salehi said on the sidelines of the ongoing Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) Summit in Tehran that "Such claims are void of any technical significance. Anybody, who is an expert in the field, knows that such claims are excuses and (the traces of) issues like that (explosive experiments) cannot be removed by cleanup," according to ISNA.
The West suspects that Iran's nuclear programs may have weapon dimensions, which was denied by the Islamic republic.
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