Iran Gets a Mixed Review on Atom Plans UN’s Understanding of Tehran’s Program is ‘Diminishing’

By Elaine Sciolino and William J. Broad

A new report said Thursday that Iran had made new but incomplete disclosures about its past nuclear activities, missing a crucial deadline under an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The United Nations agency’s report also confirmed for the first time that Iran had crossed the major milestone of putting 3,000 centrifuges into operation, a 10-fold increase from just a year ago. In theory, that means that Iran could produce enough uranium to make a nuclear weapon within a year to 18 months.

But the report indicated that the centrifuges – fast-spinning machines that enrich uranium at a vast facility in Natanz – were operating well below their capacity, and the agency said that, so far, it had not discovered any evidence that Iran was enriching to a level that would produce bomb-grade fuel.

The report concluded that Iran’s “cooperation has been reactive rather than proactive,” and it said that because of other restrictions Iran has placed on inspectors, its understanding of the full scope of Iran’s program is “diminishing.”

The Bush administration, which suspects Iran of having a secret nuclear weapons program, seized on the report’s findings as evidence of Iran’s determination to forge ahead with its nuclear program in defiance of the UN Security Council.

Calling Iran’s cooperation with the agency “selective and incomplete,” a statement from the United States Mission to the agency said: “Iran still refuses to fully disclose the past and present as the IAEA expects and to suspend fully its proliferation- sensitive activities as the Security Council requires.”

The British Foreign Office, meanwhile, urged Tehran to “come clean on all outstanding issues without delay.”

The findings seem certain to be used by the United States, Britain and France to call for far harsher sanctions against Iran than those so far imposed in two Security Council resolutions, though Russia and China have strongly opposed another round of sanctions.

It could also fuel the debate about how much time is left for diplomacy to succeed. The 3,000-centrifuge figure is a politically significant threshold because it suggests that Iran is quickly moving to a position where it could, if it wanted to, produce a bomb’s worth of uranium.

The Iranian government has denied that it is trying to manufacture a nuclear weapon.

Iran’s leaders hailed the agency’s report as proof that it had been truthful about its nuclear program and that it was right to resist Western pressure to halt the program. “The world will see that the Iranian nation has been right and the resistance of our nation has been correct,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said.

Iran’s new chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, said that the report “means all the claims that Iran’s nuclear activities have a military agenda and are deviant are not true” and that the basis for Security Council sanctions “has collapsed.”

Under the terms of a “work plan” concluded by Iran and the agency last summer, Iran was to have met a series of deadlines to resolve all unanswered questions about suspicious nuclear activities dating back two decades.

The agreed timeline set November as a date for Iran to answer all outstanding agency questions about the history of its program to build centrifuges – tall, thin machines that spin very fast to enrich, or concentrate, uranium’s rare component, uranium 235, which can fuel nuclear reactors or atom bombs.

But the report Thursday, while outlining a number of limited disclosures about the centrifuge program, noted that Iran has yet to answer some key questions. One mystery, the IAEA said, concerned “the role of the technical university at which uranium particle contamination was found.”

Another centers on a new generation of centrifuges that Ahmadinejad claimed last year that Iran had under development. In a speech, he boasted that the P-2 centrifuge would quadruple Iran’s powers of uranium enrichment.

The IAEA report said that Iran divulged some information about the P-2 program on Nov. 8, adding that Tehran would discuss the issue with the agency in December.

That means Iran missed a reporting deadline to clear up the issue, even while pursuing the far more sophisticated way of making atomic fuel. American officials and inspectors fear that the new generation of centrifuges could speed Iran’s path to developing a nuclear weapon.

In heralding the work plan last August, Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA’s director general, said in an interview that there were “clear deadlines” that proved the plan was “not an open-ended invitation to dallying with the agency or a ruse to prolong negotiations and avoid sanctions.”

He added that the goal was to wrap up the nuclear issues by December. The Iranian program has been under investigation for four years.

Now officials close to the agency are saying that the deadlines could slip into January or February.

“Iran’s active cooperation and full transparency are indispensable for full and prompt implementation of the work plan,” the agency’s report said.

The report also faulted Iran for continuing to deny inspectors broad access to its nuclear facilities and manufacturing sites under a voluntary protocol that Iran has suspended. The agency’s limited access meant that it could not say with certainty that Iran did not have a secret weapons-related enrichment program.

Originally published by The New York Times Media Group.

(c) 2007 International Herald Tribune. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.