WASHINGTON - Iran is showboating for the media rather than doing what is necessary to end a nuclear standoff with the United States and Europe, a State Department spokesman said Wednesday.
Iran's president, Mohammad Khatami, led the tour on Wednesday of the underground facility at Natanz.
It was a "staged media event" that fell far short of genuine openness about a nuclear program, which the United States suspects is dedicated to making weapons, Adam Ereli said.
Ereli said the Iranians should be answering questions from the International Atomic Energy Agency about the work going on at Natanz and elsewhere.
"If Iran were really serious about allaying the concerns of the international community, they would stop denying IAEA full and unrestricted access to suspicious sites," he said at a department briefing.
"They would talk openly or answer openly questions about past plutonium separation experiments," he said.
The United States says Iran may be testing high-explosive components for nuclear weapons.
Iran insists its nuclear program is for generation of electricity only.
During the tour of the Natanz site, journalists were denied access to the plant's string of centrifuges, the core of the process of enriching radioactive material, which can produce fuel for either power generation or weapons.
Only recently has President Bush agreed to give inspections by U.N. experts a chance. A lack of results, however, could mean efforts to pass legislation in the U.N. Security Council to punish Iran. Britain, France and Germany are in talks with the Iranians in hopes of persuading Tehran to scrap its uranium enrichment program.
