Iran said yesterday it is still seeking to substantially expand its nuclear program by installing 50,000 uranium-enriching centrifuges at a nuclear plant after announcing its atomic drive had entered an industrial phase.
"The objective of the Islamic Republic of Iran is not just the installation of 3,000 centrifuges at the Natanz plant, but we are doing everything to install 50,000 centrifuges," said Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, the head of Iran's atomic energy organization.
Iran said on Monday it could now enrich uranium on an industrial scale.
Aghazadeh said he did not disclose at a ceremony on Monday the number of centrifuges Iran has installed at a massive underground facility in Natanz as he did not want to "create ambiguities" about Iran's objectives.
"I did not want people to say that Iran has finished installing 3,000 centrifuges and everything has been completed now," he said.
"I thought that foreign media might interpret that the nuclear program of Iran had come to an end with the installation of 3,000 centrifuges," he said.
"On the contrary, we have entered into the industrial phase and the installation of machines will continue until we reach 50,000 centrifuges," he added.
Meanwhile, the US responded sharply to Monday's statement, saying Iran's continued defiance would lead to tougher sanctions against the Islamic regime. The last sanctions resolution adopted on March 24 set a 60-day deadline for Iran's compliance.
"We are very concerned about Iran's announcement that they entered an `industrial stage' of nuclear fuel production," White House national security spokesman Gordon Johndroe told reporters.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the Iranians were "almost completely encircled by the international community because of their actions and that pressure is only going to increase if they persist."
McCormack declined to "prejudge" specific actions Washington could seek in addition to financial and other UN sanctions already targeting Iran's nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
"But certainly there is a potential of more [UN] resolutions of similar type down the road," he said.
"The Iranians are doing a lot of work on behalf of those in the international system who do want to increase the international pressure by making speeches like this and making announcements like they did today," he said.
McCormack, however, also held out the option of a "negotiated pathway" through the crisis which would involve Western countries providing Iran with aid and other incentives -- including help developing a civilian nuclear power industry -- if Tehran suspends its uranium enrichment program.
Talks between the EU's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, were due to resume soon, though no dates have been announced, McCormack said.
Some experts expressed doubt on Monday that the Iranians had actually begun to enrich uranium with their larger array of centrifuges for fear of torpedoing the new round of negotiations.
"The purpose today was to publicly state that they had the centrifuges," said David Albright, a former UN nuclear inspector and now president of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.
"It would be a big surprise, though, if they did start to enrich," he said, adding that putting the centrifuges into action would "seriously reduce their chances of having any meaningful negotiations with the Europeans."
"I think they're holding back," he said.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS