Iran has 'doubled capacity to refine uranium at underground bunker'
Iran has more than doubled its capacity to refine uranium at an underground bunker, the UN said on Thursday night as Tehran was accused of re-activating the shadowy scientist at the heart of its alleged nuclear weapons programme.
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, right, at the opening ceremony of the summit of the Non-Alligned Movement in Tehran, Iran Photo: EPA/RAUF MOHSENI
By Adrian Blomfield, Jerusalem 7:54PM BST 30 Aug 2012
The International Atomic Energy Agency's latest quarterly report said that 1,000 new -- though not yet operational -- centrifuges had been installed at the fortified Fordow facility since May, in defiance of Western sanctions. The plant is used to enrich uranium at levels close to weapons-grade, according to Western diplomats.
The UN's nuclear watchdog also said that Iran had increased its stockpiles of higher-grade enriched uranium from 145-kg to 190-kg in the past three months.
Those findings alone, while not unexpected, will trigger calls for tougher sanctions against Iran and raise speculation that Israel could launch unilateral military action within weeks.
It also emerged yesterday that Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, often viewed as the mastermind of the Iranian regime's efforts to become a nuclear power, had been put back to work.
Israel said the claims of his return, taken together with the IAEA's latest assessment of Iran's enrichment activities, were evidence that Tehran was moving into place the final elements it needs to build a nuclear bomb.
"Iran continues to enrich uranium, which shows that sanctions are not having any effect," one diplomat said. "More importantly, we are seeing them put the final pieces of the jigsaw into place.
"In full contempt of international opinion, the Iranians are racing towards the finishing line and they are now just metres away from it."
After apparently being sidelined for several years, Mr Fakhrizadeh is back at work having taken charge of a research facility in Tehran that studies how to build a nuclear weapon, UN, American and Israeli officials told the Wall Street Journal.
The allegations present the biggest challenge yet to an American intelligence assessment in 2007 which concluded that Iran had frozen the military element of its nuclear programme even as it pressed ahead with its efforts to enrich uranium.
Those findings were largely based on intercepted emails from Mr Fakhrizadeh that state funding for his secret nuclear weapons research had been cut off.
In a confidential appendix of a report it released last year, the IAEA said it suspected that the scientist, who is ostensibly a Physics lecturer at Tehran's Imam Hossein University, was again involved in the nuclear programme.
But the latest findings place him in a senior role and suggest that the clandestine element of Iran's nuclear activities have been centralised in a way not seen since 2003.
Iran has gone to great lengths to shield Mr Fakhrizadeh from view. No known photographs of him exist in the public domain, and efforts by nuclear inspectors to interview him have always been rebuffed.
The IAEA has also persistently been denied access to the Parchin military base near Tehran, where Western officials believe tests on how to detonate a nuclear weapon have been carried out even before Mr Fakhrizadeh's return.
Diplomats say the report, which is to be circulated confidentially, will accuse Iran of sanitising the base to such an extent that there would now be little point in inspecting it.
The West has accused Iran of bulldozing parts of the base and satellite imagery released this month showed a building suspected of housing explosives experiments covered in tarpaulin, perhaps to hide the removal of incriminating material.
Israeli government officials say that the IAEA's conclusions leave little doubt that Iran is on the verge of becoming a nuclear power as soon as it chooses.
Despite Israel's increasingly overt agitation for military action, Western officials appear poised to make a fresh attempt to resolve the crisis through diplomacy.
Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign affairs chief, announced yesterday that she would conduct talks with Iran's main nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, "in the coming days".
The announcement came as Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, insisted that his country would never seek nuclear weapons and that its programme was entirely peaceful.
"Our motto is nuclear energy for all and nuclear weapons for none," he told heads of state assembled in Tehran for the annual summit of the Non-aligned Movement.
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On other matters: the headlines I've seen indicate leaders at the Non-Aligned Movement Conference in Teheran squirmed in their seats as Morsi and Ban Ki Moon upset their hosts with their comments, the former with comments about Iran supporting the wrong side in Syria and the latter with comments about Iran's lack of cooperation with the U.N. on it nuclear program. Both were implored not to attend. Both have shown they are not poodles of the West, so their words carry all the more weight in giving the Iranian leadership's dogma a long overdue reality check. Full marks to both of them. I guess intensive efforts will now have to go into solving the problem of how to get rid of the regime quickly. I expect Iran to show scientifically illiterate attendees of the NAM conference around Parchin to try to make out Iran does not have any issues opening it up to inspection, but the invitees won't be carrying mass spectrometers with them or wouldn't know which samples to collect (not that they would be allowed to collect any). It is interesting the Supreme Leader is still putting about the idea Iran is not developing nuclear weapons. The fact Iran is willing to forego $60m of oil sales a day to acquire the enrichment know-how and a quantity of highly enriched uranium that far exceeds any need for medical purposes directly contradicts the Supreme Leader. I expect a change of regime is coming soon to Iran by some means or other. The risk reward ratio associated with a military attack on Iran has surely just shifted in favour of an attack as the risk/reward ratio associated with doing nothing (hoping Iranians will rise up) has just got worse with the above news on Iran rapidly approaching the finishing line. Intensive efforts will have to be put into showing any military action is against the leadership and the nuclear weapon program, and not against the Iranian people, and that any attack is not to seize their natural resources, to colonise the country or to impose Western ways on them. That will be an immense challenge, and if it is solved it can only benefit us in recouping the debt we are owed. All IMO. DYOR.
UCL Price at posting:
12.0¢ Sentiment: Hold Disclosure: Held
