The UN’s nuclear watchdog demanded greater access to Iran’s nuclear programme yesterday, amid growing anxiety in the west that Tehran is much closer to building a nuclear bomb than previously feared.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, said Iran had nearly completed the uranium enrichment plant which is at the centre of US accusations that Tehran wants to develop nuclear weapons, and was working on another plant that is even bigger.
Dr ElBaradei called on Iran to agree on a more intrusive monitoring regime at its nuclear sites to help dispel fears that it was intent on producing weapons-grade uranium.
Along with Iraq and North Korea, Iran is one of President George Bush’s ”axis of evil” rogue states with ambitions to build nuclear weapons.
It was only six months ago that the IAEA discovered Iran was building centrifuge plants for processing nuclear fuel at a secret site 200 miles south of Tehran. When operational in a couple of years, the centrifuges could generate enough weapons-grade uranium for several nuclear warheads.
The discovery of the centrifuge project at Natanz, in western Iran, alarmed US officials who had long argued that Tehran was trying to build a bomb, but who had focused their concerns on the power station being built by Russians at Bushehr in the far south of the country.
The Natanz revelations showed that ”Iran is much further along, with a far more robust nuclear weapons development programme than anyone said it had”, the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, told CNN last week.
Although Iran is dependent on Russian supplies of nuclear fuel for the 1,000-megawatt reactor being built at Bushehr, Tehran also recently announced it is to mine its own uranium and process it for nuclear fuel, raising the possibility of generating plutonium for a bomb.
The Russian nuclear fuel is expected to start arriving within weeks for the power station which is expected to come on line later this year.
Russia has resisted intense US pressure to halt its nuclear cooperation with Iran, maintaining that Iran has neither the capacity nor the expertise to build the bomb. But Moscow appears to be backtracking.
”While Russia is helping Iran build its nuclear power plant, it’s not being informed of all the other projects that are currently under way,” the Russian atomic energy minister, Alexander Rumyantsev, said last week in Vienna.
Dr ElBaradei became the first international official to be shown the Natanz site just under a month ago. He reported yesterday that a pilot uranium enrichment plant at Natanz ”is nearly ready for operation, and a much larger enrichment facility [is] still under construction at the same site”.
He demanded that Iran, which is a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, agree to an ”additional protocol” under the IAEA’s nuclear inspection rights, which would enable more intrusive monitoring.
This inspection regime was devised specifically to tackle Saddam Hussein’s nuclear effort, discovered by the IAEA after the first Gulf war.
”The nuclear arms control regime is being challenged and is clearly under stress,” Dr ElBaradei warned yesterday.
President Bush last week extended US economic sanctions on Iran for another year, prompting calls yesterday in Tehran for a policy of North Korean-style non-cooperation with the IAEA.
But Dr ElBaradei said that the Iranian government had agreed to supply early information on all new nuclear facilities and that his experts were discussing with Tehran ”a number of safeguard issues that need to be clarified and actions that need to be taken”. – Guardian Unlimited Â