A one-day trip to Iran by the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, ended Thursday night with no agreement by the Iranians to halt their production of enriched uranium. And European diplomats said Iran had shown inspectors evidence that Tehran is preparing to double the size of its small-scale production facilities within weeks.
Before ElBaradei’s arrival, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issued a statement meant to erase any doubts about whether Iran was determined to plunge ahead with its fuelmaking facilities in defiance of a warning from the United Nations.
“Our answer to those who are angry about Iran obtaining the full nuclear cycle is one phrase. We say: Be angry and die of this anger,” he said late Wednesday, the official IRNA news agency reported. He left the job of meeting with ElBaradei to lower-ranking officials.
For the first time, Ahmadinejad also boasted that Iran was conducting what he called “research” on a next-generation of centrifuges, called the P-2, based on a Pakistani design.
Until now Iran has rebuffed most questions from the UN atomic energy agency about what kind of information concerning the advanced centrifuges it had obtained from the illicit nuclear network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan of Pakistan.
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Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking at the State Department on Thursday, said that “when the Security Council reconvenes, there will have to be some consequence” for Iran’s decision to defy the calls for a suspension of fuel production, “and we will look at the full range of options available.”
Elsewhere in Washington, Iran’s efforts to create the impression that it was speeding ahead to make its nuclear program a done deal was countered by intelligence officials, who said the country’s boasts had not altered Washington’s assessment of how close the country was to obtaining a weapon.
At a briefing Thursday, Thomas Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, said the official view of the intelligence agencies remained that Iran was unlikely to have nuclear weapons before 2010 at the earliest.
Another official at the briefing, Kenneth Brill, director of the National Counterproliferation Center, cautioned against accepting at face value Iran’s recent claims about producing enriched uranium and its plans for producing more than 50,000 centrifuges, enough to produce fuel for several weapons a year.
“They’ve made a statement, but it’s still to be determined what is actually happening,” said Brill, noting that Iran’s claims several years ago about achievements in nuclear technology turned out to be mostly bluster.