Iran Expanding Nuclear Effort, Agency Reports
WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 — In open defiance of the United Nations, Iran is steadily expanding its efforts to enrich uranium, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported Thursday. In response, the Bush administration immediately pressed for more severe sanctions against the country, at a moment of greatly increased tensions between Washington and Tehran.
In a mild surprise to outside experts, the nuclear agency reported that Iran was now operating or about to switch on roughly 1,000 centrifuges, the high-speed devices that enrich uranium, at its nuclear facility at Natanz.
“They are very serious,” said David Albright, a former inspector who is now president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private nuclear study group. “They are installing faster than was commonly expected.”
Coming on the heels of the Bush administration’s accusations that Iran’s Quds Force is sending deadly bombs and other weapons into Iraq, the report heightens what has become a growing confrontation.
Since the last energy agency assessment of Iran’s progress, President Bush has ordered a second aircraft carrier group into waters in striking distance of Iran, an unsubtle reminder that, if diplomacy fails, Mr. Bush could order a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. But senior administration officials have insisted in recent days that the show of military force is intended only to remind Iran of Washington’s options, and they have dismissed the idea that Mr. Bush is considering an attack.
On Thursday, administration officials said they hoped to use the agency’s conclusions to return to the Security Council for approval of deeper sanctions, and they said the United States would work outside the Council to persuade banks around the world to cut off more lending and export credits to Iran, in hopes of further damaging its oil infrastructure. Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns will go to London on Monday to begin that process, meeting with the four other permanent members of the Security Council and Germany to talk about tougher sanctions. While Russia and China agreed to the December resolution, which required the inspectors to report back on Iran’s compliance in 60 days, they indicated at the time that they were unwilling to increase the penalties.
The report appeared to confirm that the Iranian government was somewhat behind schedule in its nuclear ambitions: it boasted a year ago of plans to have roughly 3,000 centrifuges running by about now. But the 1,000 that it has nearly ready to run is still more than most outside experts believed it could install. If the country could operate 3,000 centrifuges continuously for a year, it could produce about one weapon’s worth of highly enriched uranium.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel said Thursday that even though the Iranians were not as far along as they would like to be, they were still far closer to learning how to make bomb-grade uranium than Israel was comfortable with. He dodged questions about at what point Israel might lean toward military action, a step American officials have said that they are trying to discourage.
“We’re a long way from that,” one senior administration official said earlier this week. “We want to make sure that the Israelis are, too.” He said he had no indication that Israel was planning unilateral action.
The report comes at a time of debate within the administration over whether and how to find a way to negotiate with Iran without violating Mr. Bush’s stricture that the country must first suspend its enrichment work. Officials say they are trying to exploit fissures in Iranian society, as some Iranian groups are beginning to question whether the hard-line position taken by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and some of the country’s ruling ayatollahs is worth the cost in sanctions and isolation.
“There are people in Iran who recognize that the path that they’re on is not a useful path, not a constructive path,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in Berlin before the release of the report. She said if Iran suspended enrichment, “We could begin negotiations on whatever they would like to talk about.”
On Thursday, Mr. Burns said in an interview that he believed the Security Council resolution in December was having an effect. “We did not fully anticipate the strong impact that it would have,” he said. “It has divided the government in Tehran and frankly knocked them off stride.”
But Iran’s leaders have continued to reject Mr. Bush’s condition for talks — a suspension of nuclear activity — which would essentially undercut their only real leverage in negotiations. Unlike North Korea, which agreed in principle in recent days to freeze its production of new nuclear material, Iran is not believed to possess nuclear weapons, meaning that the uranium enrichment is its main bargaining chip.
Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice are also concerned about losing leverage, senior officials say. With oil at $60 a barrel, they are concerned that no sanctions can truly harm Iran. And negotiating while Iran expands its enrichment capacity, they fear, would mean that as negotiations dragged on, Iran would get closer to being able to produce a nuclear weapon.
In its December resolution , the Security Council gave Iran 60 days to both suspend its operations and answer a series of questions. Open issues, it said, included research on high explosives, which are necessary to detonate an atom bomb, as well as the design of a missile warhead.
“Without such cooperation and transparency,” the report said, “the agency will not be able to provide assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran or about the exclusively peaceful nature of that program.”
Moreover, the Iranians have sharply restricted the access of inspectors to many of the sites they once had freedom to visit. Inspectors were allowed several recent visits to the nuclear complex at Natanz, and their report reflected greater-than-expected progress there. In addition to the 362 centrifuges in its pilot plant there, Iran in recent months has been installing an additional 656 machines in two cavernous underground halls at the complex. Of those, inspectors say, roughly half are at the final stage of testing before the introduction of uranium, and the other half were “in the final stages of installation.”
The report said that between Nov. 2 and Feb. 17, Iranian crews fed 145 pounds of uranium into the pilot plant for enrichment. That is more than they had done in previous intervals. But their effort still produced only about 15 pounds of low-enriched uranium — too little for anything but experimental analysis.
The inspectors expected that effort to expand quickly, saying that Iran planned to begin feeding uranium into the new centrifuges in the big halls by the end of this month, and to continue installing more centrifuges there so that, by May, the total number of operating machines would come to 3,000.
“They’re forging ahead,” said a European diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of protocol. “They’re not moving at a huge pace but they’re moving.”
“It’s fairly clear,” the diplomat added, “that Iran still has not addressed the outstanding issues — the scope and intent of the program.”
The Iranians say the cavernous underground halls will eventually hold 54,000 centrifuges, allowing the enrichment of uranium by the ton for reactor fuel rods — or, if the Bush administration’s fears come true, nuclear arms.
The atomic agency in its report said Iran had already moved into the cavernous halls nearly 10 tons of unenriched uranium — enough, nuclear experts said, to make at least one atom bomb. In all, at its sprawling plant at Isfahan, Iran has produced some 200 tons of uranium now ready for enrichment at Natanz. If turned into weapons-grade uranium, that would be enough for more than a dozen nuclear weapons.
Iran Expanding Nuclear Effort, Agency Reports - New York Times
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