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IAEA says Iran continues to defy U.N. Security Council demands to stop enrichment

VIENNA, Austria — The U.N. nuclear monitor reported notable advances in Iran’s uranium enrichment program Wednesday while warning for the first time that its knowledge of the country’s nuclear activities was shrinking.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s findings, while not surprising, set the stage for possible new U.N. sanctions — the third set of penalties since December.

The report by IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei expressed the agency’s concern about its "deteriorating” understanding of unexplored aspects of Iran’s nuclear program.

That finding reflected frustration with the results of a four-year IAEA investigation opened after revelations that Iran for nearly two decades had been clandestinely developing enrichment and other nuclear activities that could be used to make weapons.

A senior U.N. diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly comment on the report, suggested the shrinking hole left for inspections by Iran’s rollback of previous monitoring agreements was potentially as worrying as its refusal to suspend uranium enrichment.

In Washington, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said the report showed "Iran is thumbing its nose at the international community.”

Gregory L. Schulte, the chief U.S. delegate to the IAEA in Vienna, asked: "How can the world believe Iran’s claims that its pursuits are peaceful, if Iran’s leaders increasingly withhold information and cooperation from the world’s nuclear watchdog?”

In a show of American military strength, ships carrying 17,000 sailors and Marines moved into the Persian Gulf on Wednesday, just days before U.S.-Iran talks on Iraq.

The war games — which culminate in an amphibious landing exercise in Kuwait, just a few miles from Iran — appeared to be a clear warning to Iran ahead of the talks and possible U.N sanctions.

"The Americans are sending a message to Iran that they are not coming to the negotiating table weak, but with their military at Tehran’s doorstep,” said Mustafa Alani of the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center.

Ali Ashgar Soltanieh, Iran’s chief IAEA representative, suggested Washington and its allies on the U.N. Security Council — France and Britain — were at fault for any curtailment of IAEA inspection rights in his country. The three countries pushed the hardest for Security Council involvement last year in Iran’s nuclear activities.

"The best advice to the few Western countries that have already deteriorated the situation is to stop their actions at the Security Council,” Soltanieh told The Associated Press.

Experts from the five permanent Security Council members — the U.S., China, Britain, Russia and France — as well as Germany will meet by the end of May to discuss how to promote further negotiations with the Iranians, and what the Security Council could do if the talks fail, China’s deputy U.N. ambassador Liu Zhenmin said at U.N. headquarters in New York.

Some diplomats said any action could be delayed until after the June 6-8 summit of the Group of Eight major industrialized nations.

Mohammad Saeedi, deputy head of Iran’s Atomic Energy organization, defended his country’s decision to limit IAEA inspections in response to stepped up U.N. sanctions.

"It is right of any country to suspend part of its commitments because of a lack of realization of its own rights,” state IRNA news agency quoted Saeedi as saying.

The brevity of the four-page report indirectly reflected the lack of progress agency inspectors had made in clearing up unresolved issues, some of them stretching back for years.

Among them were: Iran’s possession of diagrams showing how to form uranium into warhead form; unexplained uranium contamination at a research facility linked to the military; information on high explosives experiments that could be used in a nuclear program, and the design of a missile re-entry vehicle.

The restricted report, obtained by The Associated Press, also noted Iran’s refusal to allow inspectors to visit a heavy water reactor under construction, or related facilities, since unilaterally revising an agreement with IAEA earlier this year. Once completed, sometime in the next decade, that complex will produce plutonium, which, like enriched uranium, can be used to make nuclear weapons.

"The agency ... remains unable to make further progress in its efforts to verify certain aspects” about Iran’s nuclear program, the report said. "Unless Iran addresses the long outstanding verification issues ... the agency will not be able to fully reconstruct the history of Iran’s nuclear program and provide assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear ... activities in Iran or about the exclusively peaceful nature of that program.”

At the underground Natanz enrichment facility, the only site now open to full IAEA monitoring, Iran’s ultimate stated goal is running 54,000 centrifuges to churn out enriched uranium — enough for dozens of nuclear weapons a year.

Uranium gas, spun in linked centrifuges, can result in either low-enriched fuel suitable to generate power, or the weapons-grade material that forms the fissile core of nuclear warheads.

Iran insists it wants the technology only to meet future power needs and argues it is entitled to enrich uranium under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

But suspicions bred by nearly two decades of clandestine nuclear activities, including black-market acquisitions of equipment and blueprints that appear linked to weapons plans, have led to two sets of U.N. sanctions over its refusal to freeze enrichment.

The report also suggested that Iranian experts had ironed out many technical glitches that had caused breakdowns in experimental, smaller-scale centrifuge operations.

It said 1,312 centrifuges at Natanz were churning out small amounts of uranium enriched to 4.8 percent — suitable for power generation. Another 328 had been assembled and an additional 328 were being built as of May 13, it said.

"They now have 1,600, centrifuges — a year and a half ago they had 40 centrifuges,” said the senior U.N. official. Iran was now able to link 164 centrifuges into an assembly capable of enrichment about every 10 days — a "notable” pace, the official said.

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Associated Press Writer Edith M. Lederer contributed to this report from the United Nations.

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