IAEA chief Muhammad el-Baradei is to submit the report to the agency’s board of governors in Vienna at a meeting starting September 10.

The report refers in large part to a timetable agreed between IAEA and Iranian negotiators in Tehran last week. Under that timetable, Iran agreed to answer by November most of the IAEA’s questions about its past nuclear activities.

The IAEA report welcomes that agreement, noting that "if Iran finally addresses the long-outstanding verification issues, the Agency should be in a position to reconstruct the history of Iran’s nuclear program."

Standoff Far From Over

But the report also makes it clear that these steps are still far from enough to defuse the crisis over Iran’s nuclear work.

Significantly, the report notes: "Once Iran’s past nuclear program has been clarified, Iran would need to continue to build confidence about the scope and nature of its present and future nuclear program."

Key Western players are already making it clear that they do not regard cooperation in answering past questions as sufficient to end their calls for new UN sanctions against Iran.

U.S. State Department spokesman Tom Casey said on August 30 that "Iran has refused to comply with its international obligations, and as a result of that the international community is going to continue to ratchet up the pressure."

The U.S. representative to the IAEA, Ambassador Gregory Schulte, noted in a statement that the IAEA report "makes clear that Iran continues to install centrifuges at Natanz and build a heavy water research reactor at Arak."

Schulte earlier told RFE/RL in an interview on August 3 that as long as those activities continue, Washington will continue to seek a third round of sanctions from the UN Security Council.

The United States and its allies want another set of sanctions, Schulte said, "because Iran has not complied with previous Security Council resolutions that require it to suspend these activities -- like uranium enrichment and production of the heavy-water reactor at Arak -- that they don't need for civil purposes, but that countries generally believe are part of a military program."

France’s Foreign Ministry this week said that until Iran makes a clear decision about suspending its enrichment activities, Paris also will continue to look into the feasibility of further sanctions.

Opposition On Sanctions

Still, as Western powers seek further sanctions, they face reluctance from Russia and China, which would like to see the crisis resolved through the IAEA rather than the Security Council.

Possibly for this reason, Tehran has sought this week to portray the recently agreed timetable as the end to much of the conflict over its nuclear activities.

On August 28, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad declared that Iran’s "nuclear file is closed."

Shannon Kile, a senior nonproliferation expert at the Stockholm International Peace Institute in Sweden, said Iran's strategy is first to try to alleviate the international pressure it is facing.

"By committing itself to resolving all the outstanding issues, I think it helps countries such as China and Russia, which are reluctant to impose more stringent sanctions on Iran," Kile said. "It allows those countries to argue that Iran should be given more time. So to some extent, I think this is an attempt by the Iranians to deflect Security Council consideration of further sanctions over its enrichment program."

Washington, which accuses Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons, has warned that it will push for a third round of sanctions that are tougher than the current ones.

Tehran maintains that its nuclear activities are entirely peaceful and only intended to develop energy.

Copyright (c) 2006. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036. www.rferl.org