Iran has told United Nations nuclear inspectors that it is about to process dozens of tonnes of raw uranium into the gas which centrifuges can turn into nuclear bomb material, a disclosure certain to reinforce US arguments that Tehran has embarked on a secret atomic weapons programme.
A confidential report by Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, supplied to diplomats yesterday and obtained by the Guardian, says that Iran has recently told his inspectors that in ”August/September” it would convert 37 tonnes of crude uranium into uranium hexafluoride — the gas spun at high speed through cascades of large centrifuges to be enriched, either to low levels for use as nuclear power station fuel, or to high levels for weapons purposes.
The news will encourage US-led hawks to seek to punish Iran for its alleged nuclear ambitions. The US undersecretary of state, John Bolton, said: ”Iran’s announcements are further strong evidence of the compelling need to take Iran’s nuclear programme to the security council.
”The United States will continue to urge other members of the IAEA board of governors to join us in this effort, to deal with the Iranian threat to international peace and security,” he added.
Iran agreed last year to freeze its enrichment programme.
More sceptical diplomats following the two-year mystery of its nuclear project said the Iranians were entitled under their international commitments to process the uranium, that they had notified the IAEA well in advance, and that there was no evidence of them enriching uranium to levels required for a weapon.
ElBaradei’s report is the prelude to a meeting of the IAEA’s 35-strong board in two weeks.
In recent weeks the war of words between Tehran and the US and Israel on the nuclear issue has heated up. The European troika of Britain, France, and Germany, which has been trying to defuse the row, is also becoming more suspicious of Iranian intentions.
On Wednesday Chris Patten, the EU’s foreign relations commissioner, admitted that after more than a year of trying to engage with Tehran the policy had ”gone backwards”.
But the latest document from ElBaradei is kind to the Iranians on several fronts.
It reports progress on a host of scientific and industrial issues, with the Iranians praised for providing access to sites and experts involved in the programme. Two previous areas of concern — laser enrichment activities and uranium conversion experiments — are now to be relegated to ”routine” inspections.
”The agency continues to make progress in understanding the programme,” the report says, but inspectors are not yet able to ”draw definitive conclusions concerning the correctness and completeness of Iran’s declarations”.
After months of mystery surrounding the traces of highly enriched uranium in samples taken from Iranian equipment, the report says Iran’s claim that they originated on items bought on the black market is ”plausible”.
While the report confirms the resumption of some uranium enrichment operations, the inspectors have found no resumption of worrying activities at the main underground enrichment complex at Natanz, nor ”any activities inconsistent with the agency’s understanding of Iran’s current suspension undertakings” at five other key sites. – Guardian Unlimited Â