Iranian engineers have completed sophisticated drawings of a deep subterranean shaft that could be used for testing explosive nuclear devices, the Washington Post reported yesterday.
Citing unnamed officials familiar with available intelligence, the newspaper said the proposed 400m tunnel is complete with remote-controlled sensors to measure pressure and heat and appears to be designed for an underground atomic test that might one day announce Tehran's arrival as a nuclear power.
US and allied intelligence analysts believe that day remains as much as a decade away -- assuming that Iran applies the full measure of its scientific and industrial resources to the project and encounters no major technical hurdles, the report said.
But whether Iran's leaders have reached that decision and what concrete progress the effort has made remain divisive questions among government analysts and UN inspectors, according to the paper.
The drawings of the unbuilt test site, not disclosed publicly before, appear to US officials to signal at least the ambition to test a nuclear explosive, the Post said.
"The diagram is consistent with a nuclear test-site schematic," the Post quotes one senior US source as saying.
The report says the drawings envision a test control team parked a safe 10km from the shaft.
But US and UN experts who have studied them said the undated drawings do not clearly fit into a larger picture, according to the report.
Nowhere, for example, does the word "nuclear" appear on them.
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