Iran has acknowledged that the underground facility is intended as a nuclear enrichment center, but says the fuel it makes will be used solely to produce nuclear power and medical isotopes. It was kept heavily protected, Iranian officials said, to ward off potential attacks.
Iran said last week that it would allow inspectors to visit the site this month. In the past three years, amid mounting evidence of a possible military dimension to its nuclear program, Iran has denied the agency wide access to installations, documents and personnel.
In recent weeks, there have been leaks about the internal report, perhaps intended to press ElBaradei into releasing it.
The report’s existence has been rumored for months and The Associated Press, saying it had seen a copy, reported fragments of it last month. On Friday, more detailed excerpts appeared on the Web site of the Institute for Science and International Security, run by David Albright, a nuclear expert.
In recent interviews, a senior European official familiar with the contents of the full report described it to the New York Times. He confirmed that Albright’s excerpts were authentic. The excerpts were drawn from a 67-page version of the report written earlier this year and since revised and lengthened, the official said; its main conclusions remain unchanged.
“This is a running summary of where we are,” the official said.
“But there is some loose language,” he said and it was “not ready for publication as an official document.”
Most dramatically, the report says the agency “assesses that Iran has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device” based on highly enriched uranium.
Weapons based on the principle of implosion are considered advanced models compared with the simple gun-type bomb that the US dropped on Hiroshima. They use a blast wave from a sphere of conventional explosives to compress a ball of bomb fuel into a supercritical mass, starting the atomic chain reaction and progressing to the fiery blast. Implosion designs, compact by nature, are considered necessary for making nuclear warheads small and powerful enough to fit atop a missile.
The excerpts of the analysis also suggest the Iranians have done a wide array of research and testing to perfect nuclear arms, like making high-voltage detonators, firing test explosives and designing warheads.
The evidence underlying these conclusions is not new: Some of it was reported in a confidential presentation to many nations in early last year by the agency’s chief inspector, Ollie Heinonen.
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