VIENNA, Austria – U.N.
inspectors do not need
American help in scrapping Libya's nascent nuclear program, the
chief inspector told The Associated Press on Tuesday in comments that
brought to mind earlier differences with Washington over Iraq and
Iran.
The U.S. administration is
convinced that Libya's nuclear program was far more extensive than
assumed by the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency. So Washington
has decided to send its own inspectors and British technical experts
to Libya to help survey and dismantle weapons programs there.
But, although while it's
happy to receive U.S. and British intelligence that will assist it,
the IAEA doesn't want help on the ground.
U.S. Can't 'Do It Alone,' but
U.N. Can?
"I am not familiar with
anything they plan to do on a bilateral basis," IAEA Director General
Mohamed ElBaradei said in an interview Tuesday, when asked about U.S.
plans to police and scrap Libya's covert nuclear program. "But as far
as I'm concerned, we have the mandate, and we intend to do it alone."
The conflict is in some ways
similar to tensions between the agency and the White House over the
extent of the nuclear weapons threat in Iraq under Saddam Hussein and
in Iran.
The Americans went to war in
March arguing that Saddam was trying to make nuclear and other weapons
of mass destruction but have still not found such arms. ElBaradei
maintains that what his teams saw in the months preceding the war
suggested the Iraqis were in no position to build a nuclear weapon.
ElBaradei also disappointed
the Americans on Iran. Though the United States asserts that uranium
enrichment and other activities point to attempts to make nuclear
weapons, a report by ElBaradei presented to the IAEA board of
governors said there was "no evidence" of an arms program, despite an
array of suspicious findings.
ElBaradei spoke after
returning from a visit to Libya, where he and an IAEA team say four
formerly secret nuclear sites in the capital, Tripoli. They said that,
from what they saw, Libya was still years away from developing nuclear
weapons.
ElBaradei also met with
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, who earlier this month admitted his
country had been trying to develop weapons of mass destruction and
agreed to let the IAEA monitor the dismantling of the programs.
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