Iran disputes that it holds enough uranium for bombs

VIENNA - Iran yesterday rejected reports it had enriched enough uranium to make an atom bomb, saying this would require steps it had ruled out, like expelling United Nations inspectors and quitting the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

An International Atomic Energy Agency report this week said Iran had stockpiled 1,385 pounds of low-enriched uranium so far, an amount US analysts told the New York Times was enough to upgrade into a nuclear weapon.

Western powers believe Iran's declared program to refine uranium to the low level required for civilian nuclear energy is a front for gaining the means to reprocess it into highly-enriched material for bombs on short notice.

Iran's envoy to the atomic energy agency said that for Iran to militarize enrichment operations would require a complex, time-consuming reconfiguration of the process that inspectors could not fail to notice unless they were kicked out.

"This information has no technical basis and gives wrong and misleading information to the public," Iranian Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh told reporters after an IAEA briefing about the report, provided for its 35-nation Board of Governors.

"In Natanz [main enrichment plant], all material produced goes into a closed container sealed by IAEA seals and watched by cameras. As soon as anyone wanted to touch the seals, the next second the whole world would know," he said.

"Because of this it is absolutely impossible to rearrange and use this low-enriched uranium to turn into high-enriched. It means stopping inspections, stopping cameras and coming out of the NPT, and we will not do that."