(President Obama and the leaders of Britain and France will reportedly accuse Iran of building a secret underground nuclear plant. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and Savannah Guthrie report.)
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(How does the world fix Nuke problems? Andrea Mitchell reports.)
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Iran Reveals Existence of Second Uranium Enrichment Plant
The government of Iran has told the International Atomic Energy Agency that it is building a second uranium enrichment plant for making fuel, the nuclear watchdog agency said Friday.
President Obama will call attention to the existence of the underground facility in an early-morning statement to reporters here before the opening of the G-20 economic summit in Pittsburgh, and will say that Western intelligence agencies have been tracking the facility for years.
Pres. Obama's statement, which will be made jointly with the leaders of France and Great Britain, was added to his schedule late Thursday night. It comes a day after Obama chaired a United Nations Security Council session on halting the spread of nuclear weapons throughout the world.
Although Pres. Obama referred to the nuclear ambitions of both Iran and North Korea during the session, diplomatic maneuvering kept any mention of the two countries out of a resolution that the council unanimously approved. The omission prompted passionate criticism from French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who will join Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown Friday morning to decry Iran's newly disclosed facility.
"How, before the eyes of the world, could we justify meeting without tackling them?" Sarkozy scolded Thursday, referring to Iran and North Korea. "We live in the real world, not a virtual world. And the real world expects us to take decisions."
Iran was previously known to have one enrichment plant.
Iran's Sept. 21 letter to the IAEA stated "that a new pilot fuel enrichment plant is under construction in the country," agency spokesman Marc Vidricaire said. "The letter stated that the enrichment level would be up to 5 percent."
Vidricaire said the Vienna-based agency responded by asking Iran to quickly provide more specifics about the facility -- "to assess safeguards verification requirements." He said Iran told the IAEA "that no nuclear material has been introduced into the facility."
Pres. Obama and other Western leaders have been trying to increase pressure on Iran to disclose more about its nuclear ambitions in advance of international talks next week about Iran's nuclear program. On Oct. 1, a senior Iranian diplomat will meet counterparts from the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany in Geneva.
"We expect a serious response from Iran," during the talks, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said this week in a statement approved by the six nations. If such a response is not forthcoming, he said, the six nations will decide on "next steps."
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in an interview this week that he is willing to have Iran's nuclear experts meet with scientists from the United States and other world powers as a confidence-building measure.
Ahmadinejad insisted that Iran is using nuclear technology only for energy and medical purposes and has no interest in acquiring nuclear weapons. He said he wants to buy enriched uranium from the United States that would be used for medical purposes.
The nuclear material Iran is now producing is 3 to 5 percent enriched and suitable only for energy purposes. Nuclear material for medical purposes must be 20 percent enriched -- purchasing such material would require a waver of international sanctions. While weapons-grade material is more than 90 percent enriched, making material for the medical reactor could put Iran on the next step to reaching that level.
In Tehran Friday, Iranian state television revealed the Sept.21 letter on its Arabic language news channel, Al-Alam, which is often used to transmit important official Iranian foreign policy decisions. The report quoted an unnamed source who described the letter as further evidence of Tehran's transparency in dealing with the IAEA about its nuclear program. It repeated Iran's long-held assertion that it is acquiring nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
Pres. Obama to accuse Iran of hiding 2nd nuke plant
President Barack Obama on Friday will urge Iran to come clean about its nuclear activities amid reports that Tehran is building a secret underground plant to manufacture nuclear fuel, officials told NBC News.
The administration wants to ratchet up pressure on Iran on the eve of talks set for next week and make clear that Tehran has not been forthcoming about its nuclear activities, officials said.
Senior administration officials noted that the nuclear non-proliferation treaty requires countries to disclose such facilities at the beginning of construction. This facility, known as the "Qum facility," would also be in violation of U.N. resolutions requiring Iran to halt enrichment activities.
Pres. Obama, along with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, will make the information on the covert facility public at around 8:30 a.m. ET, before the opening of the Group of 20 economic summit in Pittsburgh.
Iran revealed the existence of the plant earlier this week in a letter sent to Mohamed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, officials told The Associated Press.
It had previously said it was operating only one plant, which is being monitored by the IAEA.
The New York Times reported Friday that Tehran disclosed the existence of the facility after learning that its secrecy had been breached by Western intelligence agencies.
Iran is under three sets of U.N. Security Council sanctions for refusing to freeze enrichment.
The Islamic Republic insists that it has the right to the activity to generate fuel for what it says will be a nationwide chain of nuclear reactors.
But because enrichment can make both nuclear fuel and weapons-grade uranium, the international community fears Tehran will use the technology to generate the fissile material used on the tip of nuclear warheads.
Fresh sanctions?
American officials told The Times that the latest revelations would make it easier to build a case for new sanctions against Tehran in the event Iran prevents inspections or rules out halting its nuclear program.
“They have cheated three times,” The Times quoted a senior administration official with access to the intelligence saying of the Iranians. “And they have now been caught three times.”
The references to cheating stem from the discovery of the underground plant at Natanz in 2002 and after U.S. intelligence agencies uncovered evidence in 2007 that the country had sought to design a nuclear warhead, the newspaper said.
Pivotal talks
The revelations further burden the chances of progress in scheduled Oct. 1 talks between Iran and six world powers.
At that planned meeting — the first in more than a year — the five permanent U.N. Security Council members and Germany will be pressing Iran to scale back on its enrichment activities. But Tehran has declared that it will not bargain on enrichment.
Officials told The AP that Iran's letter about the enrichment plant contained no details about the location of the facility, when it had started operations or the type and number of centrifuges it was running.
The government officials — one speaking from his European capital outside Vienna, the other a diplomat in Vienna from a country accredited to the IAEA — demanded anonymity Friday because their information was confidential. One said he had seen the letter. The other told the AP that he had been informed about it by a U.N. official who had seen it.
While Iran's mainstay P-1 centrifuge is a decades-old model based on Chinese technology, it has begun experimenting with state-of-the art prototypes that enrich more quickly and efficiently than its old model.
U.N. officials familiar with the IAEA's attempts to monitor and probe Iran's nuclear activities have previously told The AP that they suspected Iran might be running undeclared enrichment plants.
The existence of a secret Iranian enrichment program built on black market technology was revealed seven years ago. Since then the country has continued to expand the program with only a few interruptions as it works toward its aspirations of a 50,000-centrifuge enrichment facility at the southern city of Natanz.
The last IAEA report on Iran in August said Iran had set up more than 8,000 centrifuges to churn out enriched uranium at the cavernous underground Natanz facility, although the report said that only about 4,600 of those were fully active.
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Sources: Washington Post, NY Times, Bloomberg.com, MSNBC, Ynetnews.com, Google Maps
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