''A few months ago we denied these kinds of claims and we do so again," Egyptian government spokesman Magdy Rady said. ''Nothing about our nuclear program is secret and there is nothing that is not known to the IAEA."
But one of the diplomats said the Egyptians ''tried to produce various components of uranium" without declaring it to the IAEA, as they were bound to under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The products included several pounds of uranium metal and uranium tetrafluoride -- a precursor to uranium hexafluoride gas, the diplomat said on condition of anonymity.
Uranium metal can be processed into plutonium, while uranium hexafluoride can be enriched into weapons-grade uranium -- both for use in nuclear warheads.
The diplomat said the Vienna-based IAEA had not yet drawn a conclusion about the scope and purpose of the experiments. But the work appeared to have been sporadic, involved small amounts of material, and lacked a particular focus, the diplomat said.
That, he said, indicated that the work was not directly geared toward creating a full-scale program to make nuclear weapons.
The diplomat said that Egypt's program was not ''cohesive."
''It's not like Iran, where there was a clear plan to produce" uranium hexafluoride, the gas that turns into enriched uranium when spun in centrifuges, he said.
He also warned against comparisons to South Korea, which conducted larger-scale plutonium and uranium experiments in 1982 and 2000 without reporting them to the agency.
Iran, which the United States accuses of having nuclear weapons ambitions, developed a full-fledged uranium enrichment program over nearly two decades of clandestine activity revealed only in mid 2002. Iran says it plans to enrich only to levels used to generate nuclear fuel and not to weapons-grade uranium.
In Vienna, IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said the agency would not comment on the revelations about Egypt.
Cairo has denied in the past it is trying to develop a nuclear weapons program.
The country appeared to turn away from the pursuit of such a program decades ago. The Soviet Union and China reportedly rebuffed its requests for nuclear arms in the 1960s, and by the 1970s, Egypt gave up the idea of building a plutonium production reactor and reprocessing plant.
