Vienna - As
Iran increases the level at which it is enriching uranium, it is getting closer to being able to build
nuclear weapons, according to nuclear experts. Iran on Tuesday plans to start enriching uranium to a grade of nearly 20 per cent, the country informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) just one day earlier.
But the IAEA, Russia, France and the United States had tried since October to get Iran to agree to a deal that would prevent just that.
Under the proposal, the Islamic republic would ship uranium that it has enriched to 3.5 per cent out of the country, in exchange for foreign-made, 20-per-cent enriched fuel for a medical-purpose reactor in Tehran.
"It's clearly about making a bomb," said James Acton, a physicist and nuclear analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
Tehran's decision was worrying because "the key thing is that Iran is learning to overcome the technical challenges of enriching to a higher level," he said, which would be helpful for eventually making nuclear weapons.
Although nuclear weapons are built with uranium enriched to 90 per cent, getting to 20 per cent would bring Iran's nuclear engineers very close to getting weapons-grade material, non-proliferation expert David Albright explained.
"You can do it in a short period of time with a small number of centrifuges," the head of the ISIS think tank in Washington said, as it would take these machines just six months to turn reactor fuel into bomb material.
Iran's ambassador at the United Nations in
Vienna rejected the notion that the international community should be worried about the higher-grade material his country plans to make.
"This is the legal right of any (IAEA) member state to enrich to what they require," he said, pointing to the fact that the Tehran
research reactor produces isotopes used for medical purposes.
While no one has so far questioned the legitimacy of that reactor, intelligence services of several countries including the US hold the view that Tehran's leaders want at least the technical capability for making nuclear arms as a strategic asset, and that perhaps they are already developing such weapons secretly.
"It is my gut feeling that Iran would like to have the technology to enable it to have nuclear weapons," former
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said in June.
His successor, Yukiya Amano, has been treading more carefully, noting his concern over Iran's latest decision while holding open the possibility that the multinational fuel deal could still be achieved.
Both experts said that Tehran's leaders probably had no intention to ever sign on to the agreement that world powers have described as a confidence-building measure.
According to Acton, Iran's decision to make the fuel itself betrayed its true intentions.
"If they wanted the fuel for the research reactor, they could have done the fuel swap" envisaged by the IAEA in a relatively short period of about a year, while building the know-how to fabricate the fuel themselves would take considerably longer at a higher cost.
