Obama: Iran building secret nuclear fuel plant
Friday, September 25, 2009
President says Tehran ‘breaking rules that all nations must follow’
View related photosPITTSBURGH - President Barack Obama demanded Friday that Iran open up a previously covert nuclear fuel facility to international inspectors, saying "Iran is breaking rules that all nations must follow."
Obama, flanked by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, said the site "deepens a growing concern" that Iran has failed to live up to its international obligations.
Obama said the "size and configuration" of the site was inconsistent with a peaceful facility, which is a direct challenge to Tehran's claim that its nuclear plants are designed for peaceful purposes.
The three leaders made the announcement before the opening of the Group of 20 economic summit in Pittsburgh.
'Serial deception'
Speaking after Obama, Sarkozy said Iran must comply with international demands by December or face a new round of sanctions. "Everything must be put on the table now," the French leader said.
Brown bluntly accused Iran of engaging in "serial deception" that would "shock and anger" the world.
The Western powers had "no choice but to draw a line in the sand" on Iran's nuclear program, Brown said.
Raising the pressure
The Obama administration wants to ratchet up pressure on Iran on the eve of talks set for next week and make clear that Tehran has not been forthcoming about its nuclear activities, officials told NBC.
Earlier, senior administration officials noted that the nuclear non-proliferation treaty requires countries to disclose such facilities at the beginning of construction. This plant, located about 20 miles from the holy city of Qum, would also be in violation of U.N. resolutions requiring Iran to halt enrichment activities.
U.S. officials said that the proximity to Qum would make a strike on the facility very difficult politically as it would likely spark an uproar in the Muslim world.
Iran revealed the existence of the plant earlier this week in a letter sent to Mohamed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, officials told The Associated Press.
It had previously said it was operating only one plant, which is being monitored by the IAEA.
The New York Times reported Friday that Tehran disclosed the existence of the facility after learning that its secrecy had been breached by Western intelligence agencies.
Iran is under three sets of U.N. Security Council sanctions for refusing to freeze enrichment.
The Islamic Republic insists that it has the right to the activity to generate fuel for what it says will be a nationwide chain of nuclear reactors.
But because enrichment can make both nuclear fuel and weapons-grade uranium, the international community fears Tehran will use the technology to generate the fissile material used on the tip of nuclear warheads.
Fresh sanctions?
American officials told The Times that the latest revelations would make it easier to build a case for new sanctions against Tehran in the event Iran prevents inspections or rules out halting its nuclear program.
“They have cheated three times,” The Times quoted a senior administration official with access to the intelligence saying of the Iranians. “And they have now been caught three times.”
The references to cheating stem from the discovery of the underground plant at Natanz in 2002 and after U.S. intelligence agencies uncovered evidence in 2007 that the country had sought to design a nuclear warhead, the newspaper said.
Pivotal talks
The revelations further burden the chances of progress in scheduled Oct. 1 talks between Iran and six world powers.
At that planned meeting — the first in more than a year — the five permanent U.N. Security Council members and Germany will be pressing Iran to scale back on its enrichment activities. But Tehran has declared that it will not bargain on enrichment.
Officials told The AP that Iran's letter about the enrichment plant contained no details about the location of the facility, when it had started operations or the type and number of centrifuges it was running.
The government officials — one speaking from his European capital outside Vienna, the other a diplomat in Vienna from a country accredited to the IAEA — demanded anonymity Friday because their information was confidential. One said he had seen the letter. The other told the AP that he had been informed about it by a U.N. official who had seen it.
While Iran's mainstay P-1 centrifuge is a decades-old model based on Chinese technology, it has begun experimenting with state-of-the art prototypes that enrich more quickly and efficiently than its old model.
U.N. officials familiar with the IAEA's attempts to monitor and probe Iran's nuclear activities have previously told The AP that they suspected Iran might be running undeclared enrichment plants.
The existence of a secret Iranian enrichment program built on black market technology was revealed seven years ago. Since then the country has continued to expand the program with only a few interruptions as it works toward its aspirations of a 50,000-centrifuge enrichment facility at the southern city of Natanz.
The last IAEA report on Iran in August said Iran had set up more than 8,000 centrifuges to churn out enriched uranium at the cavernous underground Natanz facility, although the report said that only about 4,600 of those were fully active.
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