US says new evidence of Iran nuclear arms ambition

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – New evidence suggests Iran has made
significant progress in its pursuit of nuclear weapons and that
should strengthen the case for increasing international
pressure on Tehran to end the program, U.S. and European
officials say.

The data, which in recent months was shared with the
International Atomic Energy Agency and key countries, is “not
definitive (but) it is strongly suggestive that Iran has made
significant advancement toward weaponization,” one U.S.
official told Reuters.

Another U.S. official said that “no one is portraying this
as definitive (but) it’s one more piece of a strong
circumstantial case that they are pursing a nuclear weapon.”

The officials, who asked not to be named because of the
sensitivity of the issue, gave no details of the documents.

Nuclear experts have been saying for months that the fact
that U.S. claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction
capabilities proved largely false is fueling doubts about
intelligence on Iran.

The New York Times reported on its Web site on Saturday
that in mid-July, senior American intelligence officials called
the leaders of the IAEA to the top of a skyscraper overlooking
the Danube in the Austrian capital Vienna and unveiled the
contents of what they said was a stolen Iranian laptop
computer.

The Americans showed data from more than 1,000 pages of
Iranian computer simulations and accounts of experiments,
saying they showed a long effort to design a nuclear warhead,
the newspaper reported, quoting European and American
participants in the meeting.

The newspaper said the U.S. officials argued the data was
“the strongest evidence yet that, despite Iran’s insistence
that its nuclear program is peaceful, the country is trying to
develop a compact warhead to fit atop its Shahab missile, which
can reach Israel and other countries in the Middle East.”

Iran, which kept a uranium enrichment program secret for 18
years until 2003, is facing referral to the U.N. Security
Council for possible sanctions after failing to convince the
international community its nuclear ambitions are entirely
peaceful.

The New York Times said Iranian officials denied any
knowledge of the warhead plans.

“We are sure that there are no such documents in Iran,” the
paper quoted Ali Larijani, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, as
saying in an interview in Tehran. “I have no idea what they
have or what they claim to have. We just hear the claims.”

A U.S. official and a European official told Reuters that
technical experts, including at the IAEA, who got the briefing
were quite concerned at what the data shows.

But The New York Times said that apart from Britain, France
and Germany — which have joined Washington in demanding that
Iran halt suspicious nuclear activities — other countries
remain skeptical.