AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE,
TEHRAN: Iran announced Tuesday it had successfully enriched uranium to make nuclear fuel, a major breakthrough in its disputed atomic drive that defies a UN Security Council demand for the work to stop.
The Islamic regime's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also called for a no-holds-barred acceleration of enrichment work — a process that can be extended to make the fissile core of an atom bomb.
The United States immediately warned Iran was “moving in the wrong direction”. Iran now runs the risk of UN sanctions when a Security Council deadline expires on April 28.
“Our people, with the help of God, have successfully mastered nuclear technology. Iran has joined the nuclear states,” Ahmadinejad said in a speech to top military and political leaders in the northeastern holy city of Mashhad.
“Iran's nuclear programme is purely peaceful,” he added, calling on foreign governments to “recognise and respect Iran's rights”.
He even called for “all nuclear officials to speed up their work so as to produce fuel for the country's (future) power stations.”
The dramatic news was greeted by the audience with chants of “Allahu Akbar” (“God is Greatest”).
Vice president and atomic energy chief Gholam Reza Aghazadeh said the milestone in Iran's programme was crossed on Monday — at a pilot centrifuge plant in Natanz — with the uranium enriched to 3.5 percent, or the purity required for civilian reactor fuel.
This, he asserted, “paves the way for enrichment on an industrial scale” using an enormous 110 tonnes of UF6 feedstock gas already produced.
He also said Iran was “determined” to complete work within three years on a heavy water reactor in Arak — which critics say which could also produce plutonium for a nuclear weapon.
US President George W. Bush has rejected media reports that the United States is planning to attack Iran over the issue as “wild speculation,” and said diplomacy was preferred to resolve the nuclear crisis.
But White House spokesman Scott McClellan immediately responded to the latest challenge from Iran by saying Tehran was “moving in the wrong direction”.
Iran's move “only further underscores why the international community has serious concerns about the regime's nuclear ambitions,” he said.
At the State Department, spokesman Sean McCormack described the move as “another step by the Iranian regime in defiance of the international community,” but appeared to play down its significance.
“One of the critical pathways to development of a nuclear weapon is the ability to enrich uranium to high levels. That is not the announcement that the Iranians made today,” he said. “It's a fairly low enrichment level.”
A Foreign Office spokesman London said “these latest Iranian statements are not helpful” as the United Nations has demanded Iran stop all enrichment and reprocessing activity.
“If Iran does not comply, the Security Council will revisit the issue,” he said.
Iran's announcement is also a blow to International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who has been asked by the Security Council to report on Iranian compliance by April 28 and is also due to arrive in Tehran overnight Wednesday in a fresh bid to resolve tensions.
A foreign diplomat said Iran's announcement, if true, meant the country had made a “technological leap” and was advancing much quicker than previously thought.
“If it is true, it means that they are going faster than we expected. It represents a technological leap forward … ” said the Tehran-based diplomat, who asked not to be named.
This means Iran could soon cross the so-called “point of no-return” — a point where it has the technical know-how and the capacity to build a bomb.
Over the weekend, the Washington Post and the New Yorker magazine reported that President Bush was examining military options against Iran, a country he has already lumped into an “axis of evil”.
Although Bush has dismissed the reports as “wild speculation”, oil prices have spiked amid fears of a conflict. The price of Brent North Sea crude oil reached an all-time high of 69.70 dollars per barrel on Tuesday.
