Iranian leader trumpets expanded nuclear program

A picture released by the official website of Iran's presidency office on April 8, 2008, showed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visiting the Natanz uranium enrichment facilities. (Ho/AFP/Getty Images)

TEHRAN - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said yesterday that his country has dramatically expanded the number of machines at its disposal producing enriched uranium, defying international demands for the country to halt the production of nuclear material.

But the hard-line leader, quoted by official and semiofficial media, also appeared to suggest that Iran might be willing to stop adding centrifuges, a condition for preliminary talks to end the diplomatic standoff over Iran's nuclear program.

Analysts played down the significance of Ahmadinejad's assertion. "It's not just the number of centrifuges that counts," said a Western diplomat in Tehran, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It's whether they're running and how well." Still, he added, Ahmadinejad's assertion "won't help" resolve the standoff between Iran and the West.

Ahmadinejad told scholars in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad that Iran possessed 6,000 centrifuges, according to the Fars news agency. A May report by the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran had about 3,500 centrifuges running at its uranium enrichment plant near the town of Natanz.

The centrifuges can produce nuclear material suitable for a power plant or, if highly enriched, an atomic bomb. In theory, 6,000 centrifuges running continuously can produce enough weapons-grade uranium for one bomb in six months. "The West wanted us to stop," Ahmadinejad was quoted as telling the scholars. "We resisted, and now they want to resume negotiations."

Iran repeatedly has asserted that it is not trying to build a nuclear weapon, which its religious leaders have decried as un-Islamic. And the Islamic Republic's enrichment program also has been bedeviled by technical problems, diplomats and arms-control analysts said.

The United States, Israel, Europe, and most Western arms-control analysts suspect that Iran is trying to at least attain the capability to begin producing bombs quickly if it so decides. Turning the reactor-grade uranium Iran now produces into weapons-grade material is considered relatively easy.

Iran says that eventually it hopes to have more than 50,000 centrifuges operating at its plant near Natanz. In April, it said it was on the verge of having a total of 6,000 centrifuges operating. Ahmadinejad's comments yesterday were the first public statement asserting an expansion. "We knew they were heading toward 6,000 assembled," said Jeffrey G. Lewis, an arms control analyst at the New America Foundation, a think tank. "But there's some dispute as to whether they're running them or not."

The European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, recently offered the Iranians a US-endorsed package of incentives meant to entice them to stop producing enriched uranium.

Solana also proposed a six-week period of prenegotiations, called "freeze for freeze," during which Iran would add no centrifuges and the West would refrain from pushing for a fourth round of economic sanctions against Iran at the UN Security Council.

Iran failed to respond to either offer during talks July 19 in Geneva, which were attended by Undersecretary of State William J. Burns in the highest-level diplomatic contact between Iran and the United States for nearly 30 years.

Solana, Burns, and European envoys gave Iran a deadline of late July to respond positively to the offer or face a new round of sanctions, which could include prohibitions on selling Iran refined petroleum products it desperately needs to run its economy.

Iranian officials have decried the deadline and refused to commit to stopping the expansion of the program.

But in his latest comments, Ahmadinejad appeared to leave open the possibility that Iran would stop expanding, albeit at a higher number of centrifuges than previously thought and for longer than six weeks.

"Today they [the West] have agreed that the existing 5,000 to 6,000 centrifuges do not increase and that there is no problem if this number of centrifuges work," Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying by state radio, according to Agence France-Presse.

US officials repeatedly stated that no negotiations can begin with Iran before it verifiably halts all enrichment-related activities. But the Bush administration recently softened its stance, agreeing to sign on to the "freeze for freeze" proposal and to dispatch Burns to Geneva.

The Bush administration said yesterday's statement by Ahmadinejad did not facilitate a resolution. "Announcements like this, whatever the true number is, are not productive and will only serve to further isolate Iran from the international community," said spokesman Carlton Carroll.