REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, DUBAI - Iran resumed talks on its nuclear program with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Saturday, the official IRNA news agency said, in discussions expected to broach sensitive military-related issues.

The UN atomic agency hopes to persuade Iran to finally start addressing long-held suspicions that it may have researched how to build atomic bombs. Tehran has rejected the accusations of weaponization-related work as baseless and said it will cooperate with the IAEA to clear up any "ambiguities".

Iran was represented in the discussions by Reza Najafi, its envoy to the IAEA, while the team from the UN nuclear watchdog was led by deputy IAEA director general Tero Varjoranta, IRNA said.

Saturday's meeting comes 10 days before Tehran and world powers, building on a landmark interim deal that took effect last month, start talks on a long-term accord on Iran's nuclear aspirations that would avert the threat of a Middle East war.

The spokesman for Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation, Behrouz Kamalvandi, was reported on Friday as saying that Iran's aim was "to answer the IAEA's questions" at the talks.

Under an agreement signed in November, the IAEA has already visited a heavy water production plant and a uranium mine in Iran. However, those first steps did not go to the heart of its investigation and Western diplomats will watch Saturday's meeting closely to see whether the next phase achieves that. The IAEA wants Iran to clarify its activities in a range of areas of potential application to developing bombs, including various experiments and computer calculations.