Iran accelerates program

VIENNA, Austria – Iran has accelerated its program to enrich uranium and defied a U.N. Security Council deadline to suspend nuclear activities before the country is capable of producing fuel for nuclear weapons, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said Thursday.

The report by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, confirmed that Iran recently began installing the first of 3,000 gas centrifuges in a heavily fortified, underground chamber at Natanz and that it plans to “bring them gradually into operation by May 2007.”

A facility that large, if it functions properly, could produce enough highly enriched uranium in a year to build a nuclear warhead. A senior U.N. diplomat here cautioned that the Iranian schedule is “fairly optimistic” and said that the highly sensitive centrifuge cascades may not be operational before the fall.

The six-page report is almost certain to trigger moves by the Bush administration and its European allies for stiffer U.N. sanctions against the hard-line Iranian regime. The escalating crisis now moves to London, where major powers will meet Monday to consider a range of actions against Iran.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that the United States was determined to “use all available channels, and the Security Council” to draft a new resolution aimed at halting Tehran’s nuclear activity.

The report “shows that Iran has not changed its behavior, has not changed its views, and is continuing on the path of defiance,” said State Department spokesman Tom Casey.

But Russia’s U.N. ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, told reporters that sanctions are not a solution. “We should not lose sight of the goal and the goal is not to have a resolution or to impose sanctions,” Churkin said. “The goal is to accomplish a political outcome of this problem.”

The Security Council voted unanimously on Dec. 23 to give Iran 60 days to close an above-ground test facility at Natanz, where it had begun small-scale uranium enrichment last August. The resolution also required Iran to suspend work at an underground facility at Natanz, halt construction of a nuclear reactor at Arak and freeze other worrisome nuclear activities.

ElBaradei’s report indicated that the Iranians instead pushed the program into higher gear. The senior U.N. official described the report as showing “no progress” in resolving the IAEA’s major outstanding concerns.

Iran insists it will produce uranium enriched only to the lower levels suitable for use in civilian reactors, but the international community fears an industrial-sized enrichment effort could be converted to produce weapons-grade material.

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, showed no signs of compromise, however. Iran “will not withdraw from its nuclear stances even for one single step,” he said in the provincial town of Talesh, according to the semi-official Fars News Agency.