UN inspectors arrive to check on Iran's enrichment
Two UN inspectors have arrived in Iran to visit its uranium enrichment plant, the authorities said today as Western governments and experts expressed dismay and scepticism over Iran’s announcement that it is now enriching uranium in industrial quantities.
“Two inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency arrived in Tehran this morning,” the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
An official of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation confirmed their arrival, and said the visit was “routine.”
Government leaders said Monday that Iran had reached industrial scale production of enriched uranium by the operation of 3,000 centrifuges, nearly 10 times as many as previously declared.
The centrifuges are housed at the Natanz plant, which the IAEA inspectors are due to visit.
The US and the European Union protested the move as it showed Iran’s defiance of repeated requests from the UN Security Council for a cessation of enrichment - a process that can yield fuel for nuclear reactors or material for bombs.
Iranian newspapers splashed the announcement on their front pages today, with only a few making a passing reference to the international criticism. All Iranian political factions support the nuclear programmes, seeing it as a mark of the country’s technological progress.
But many people outside Iran doubt on the governments’ claims. US experts say one could theoretically build a bomb within a year or two with 3,000 centrifuges, but they doubted Iran really had so many up and running, given its uneven record with a much smaller number.
The Iran analyst at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies, Mark Fitzpatrick, said the announcement sounded like “a boast too far.”
“We need to hear from the inspectors to know for sure, but it sounds to me as though Iran has not yet gotten its enrichment program as far as it has been proclaiming,” Fitzpatrick said.
The Russian government, which knows the Iran’s nuclear programme well through helping it to build its only reactor, said the announcement came as a surprise.
“We haven’t got a confirmation yet that they have actually begun uranium enrichment at the new cascades” of centrifuges, said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Expressing concern over the implication of Iran’s move, Lavrov added that Russia had “adopted a serious attitude to what is going on.”
French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy condemned Iran’s decision to expand enrichment in defiance of the Security Council. “I deplore the announcements made yesterday, which are a bad sign,” he said in a statement.
But his ministry’s spokesman, Jean-Baptiste Mattei, also doubted they were true. “There are announcements, and then there is technological reality,” he said.
A former director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Pierre Goldschmidt, said: “It is doubtful that they have operated 3,000 centrifuges … with UF6 (uranium gas).”
But even if the Iranians had done so, he added, “in no way can that be considered as an economic industrial-scale facility. This has more to do with pride, defiance of the international community and internal intoxication.”
