(CNSNews.com) – A defiant Iran has announced a series of steps certain to deepen Western suspicions about its nuclear activities, including the building of ten new uranium enrichment facilities, to be located in hard-to-attack parts of the country.
“From now on, our enrichment sites will not be built in the open air but in the hearts of mountains,” state media quoted the regime’s top nuclear official, Ali Akbar Salehi, as saying. As a further safeguard against military attack, “they will not be concentrated in one area,” he added.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s cabinet instructed the country’s atomic agency to start building at five already identified sites, and to determine locations for a further five.
Each would be the size of Iran’s first known enrichment plant, in the central city of Natanz, which has been at the center of the seven-year standoff between Tehran and the West.
Iran’s announcement came as a response to the vote Friday by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)’s 35-member board of governors, condemning Iran for building a second enrichment plant near Qom and calling for a halt to the work.
Just three countries – Venezuela, Cuba and Malaysia – backed Iran by voting against the resolution.
The outcome was a blow for Tehran: Not only did Iran’s traditional backers, China and Russia, vote for the resolution, but so did three of its fellow Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) members, Azerbaijan, Burkina Faso and Cameroon. (The other four OIC states on the board, Afghanistan, Egypt, Pakistan and Turkey, abstained, along with Brazil and South Africa.)
The IAEA resolution refers the Qom case to the U.N. Security Council. Iran is already under three rounds of relatively mild Security Council sanctions for refusing to halt uranium enrichment.
Salehi called the decision to build ten new enrichment plants “a firm reply to the indecent move” taken at the IAEA meeting.
Iran’s parliament at the weekend called on the government to press ahead with the nuclear program and scale back cooperation with the IAEA, accusing the Vienna-based U.N. body of “double standards.”
The outgoing IAEA chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, warned earlier that the board of governors’ resolution could harm sensitive efforts to achieve a diplomatic resolution to the drawn-out crisis.
The Egyptian also acknowledged, in his last address to the board, that the IAEA had “effectively reached a dead end, unless Iran engages fully with us.”
Iran says its nuclear activities are designed for peaceful, electricity-generation and research purposes. But it concealed the program from the international community for almost two decades – until it was exposed by regime opponents in 2002 – and the West suspects strongly that it is trying to acquire the know-how to make nuclear weapons.
Uranium enrichment can produce fuel for either power plants or atomic bombs – depending on the level of enrichment achieved. A government possessing a certain amount of low-enriched uranium (LEU) could, if it chose to do so, enrich it further to a very high level, and thereby obtain sufficient fissile material for a bomb in a relatively short time.
The IAEA recently brokered an agreement under which Iran would ship the LEU it already has to Russia or another country, for conversion into fuel rods which Iran can then use to fuel a medical research reactor in Tehran.
The deal agreed by the United States, France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany was touted as a potential breakthrough in resolving the standoff – but Tehran rejected the offer as it stood.
Iran’s ISNA news agency quoted a pro-government lawmaker, Ali Reza Zakani, as saying that Tehran turned down the offer because supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Iranian experts were opposed to the plan.