"These will be crucial weeks," said Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). "Expectations are enormously high that Iran will increase its cooperation and produce answers to all major outstanding issues."

The UN agency has announced that its inspectors will return to Iran Sunday in the hope of leading Teheran to prove that it is not developing nuclear weapons, as the United States and some other countries suspect.

Iran denies that it is developing a nuclear bomb, and says it is being placed under unreasonable pressure by Washington.

Iran defied the United Nations' nuclear watchdog Wednesday, insisting that it would not bow to international demands to give up its uranium enrichment activities.

Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi said in New York that his country wanted to produce enriched uranium to avoid reliance on supplies of nuclear fuel from Russia -- which is building Iran's first nuclear reactor.

The (IAEA) imposed the October 31 deadline last week, saying that unless there was complete transparency, the issue would be referred to the UN Security Council, which has the power to impose punishing sanctions on the Islamic republic for violating the the international nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

The Iranian ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Akbar Salehi, said the United States was using the issue in order to engineer the "invasion of yet another territory."

The IAEA inspectors, under the leadership of Pierre Goldschmidt, a Belgian, will seek to get to the bottom of allegations that Iran is reprocessing and enriching uranium. They will concentrate on an enrichment facility at Natanz, 250 kilometers (155 miles) south of Teheran where traces of fuel with possible military application has been detected.

The United States and others believes it may have come from Pakistan or North Korea, or the black market.

"The key is going to be the level of cooperation on the part of Iran," Fleming said. "If they can provide us with the information we need as well as the access to sites we need, we will be in a good position to solve some of these mysteries."

Referring to the discovery of enriched uranium found at Natanz), Fleming added, "we will also need the full and active cooperation of all countries that may have assisted the Iraian program."

The IAEA also wants Iran to sign an additional protocol to the non-proliferation treaty that would permit unannounced and rigorous inspections.

But Fleming said this is not a short-term priority.

She said the protocol was "extremely important for the long-term future monitoring of Iran's nuclear program. But what we are faced with right now is a situation where we have little more than four weeks to investigate, come up with answers to sensitvive issues, and for that we're asking Iran for the sake of transparency to act as if the additional protocol was in place."

The question is whether Iran will provide the full cooperation the IAEA is demanding, despite some indications that Tehjeran wants to go on dragging its feet. Former President Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani said in an interview published Tuesday that the negotiations would continue but "more slowly."

But if the IAEA doesn't get the cooperation it is demanding, it does not have to wait for the October 31 deadline before issuing a report accusing Iran of failing to heed its obligations, one diplomat said.

While the Iranians were dallying, he said, "they clearly are concerned not to destroy the bridges."

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