Iran is ready to start assembling thousands of centrifuges to produce enriched uranium -- a possible pathway to nuclear arms -- after finishing most preliminary work on an underground facility housing such machines, a diplomat and a UN official said.
The two -- who demanded anonymity in exchange for divulging confidential information -- said much, but not all of the hardware needed for the installation of the centrifuges was now in place at the Natanz facility designated to house Tehran's industrial-scale enrichment program.
Both men emphasized on Thursday that the facility had been ready for some time, and there was no sign that actual work on putting in the centrifuges would begin at any particular date.
Still, there has been speculation that the hardline leadership might start doing so next month, to celebrate the 28th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution that brought the clerical leadership to power.
The revelations -- based on reports by inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) visiting Natanz this week -- appeared to strengthen claims from Tehran that it is moving toward large-scale enrichment involving 3,000 centrifuges, which spin uranium gas into enriched material. Low-enriched uranium can be used to generate power, while highly enriched levels serve as the fissile core of nuclear warheads.
"We are moving toward the production of nuclear fuel, which requires 3,000 centrifuges and more than this figure," government spokesman Gholamhossein Elham told reporters on Monday. "This program is being carried out and moving toward completion."
Iran's leaders have suggested those machines would be in place by March 20, the end of the Iranian year. But the diplomat and official said quick completion of such a large-scale project was unlikely, describing the complicated process of setting up linked "cascades" of thousands of centrifuges that are needed to repeatedly spin uranium to varying degrees of enrichment as taking "months," even for countries with more technically advanced enrichment programs than the Islamic republic.
Another point of uncertainty is how many centrifuges Iran has assembled. The IAEA has not seen any beyond the few hundred Tehran has shown inspectors. But David Albright, whose Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security tracks Iran's nuclear activities, said Tehran technicians are likely to have built more than 1,000 of the machines at a secret location.
The US and some of its allies accuse Iran of trying to produce nuclear weapons.
Iran denies this, saying its program is only for generating electricity. Tehran says that as a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, it has the right to develop a peaceful uranium enrichment program to produce nuclear power.
The IAEA has said it has found no evidence that Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons, but it has criticized the country for concealing certain nuclear activities, conducting experiments with possible links to weapons programs, possessing a drawing linked to nuclear warheads and failing to answer questions about the program.
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