The director general of the UN nuclear inspection agency warned Tehran and Washington for the first time on Monday that their yearlong stalemate over Iran's nuclear activities was turning into a "brewing confrontation" that he said "urgently needs to be defused."
In his statement to the member countries of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general, stopped just short of saying that the confrontation could become a military conflict, though his aides said that was clearly the implication.
In private meetings with European and US officials, ElBaradei also warned that unless diplomatic means were found to stop Iran's installation of new centrifuges -- the machines that enrich uranium -- the country could have 8,000 of the machines in place by the end of the year.
worst case
If all those machines were working -- which would be a tremendous challenge for Iran, given the highly sensitive nature of the equipment and the technical obstacles that have plagued Iranian engineers for years -- they could produce enough uranium for roughly three nuclear weapons a year, nuclear experts say.
But that is a worst-case scenario that assumes Iran could operate the equipment as well as Pakistan did in the late 1980s. One of the founders of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, supplied Iran with the prototypes that enabled Iran to build its equipment.
US experts warn that it is far from clear that Iran could get a large number of centrifuges to spin simultaneously for long periods, which is what it would take to produce bomb-grade uranium.
So far, inspectors have said that all the uranium they have tested from the country's centrifuges has been enriched to reactor grade, which is not sufficient to make a weapon.
second term
Still, ElBaradei's comments appeared likely to add to his tensions with the US administration, which attempted to block his nomination for a second term at the agency just months before he won the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.
Last month, the US and several of its European allies issued a formal demarche to ElBaradei after he told the New York Times that the US strategy of negotiating with the Iranians only after they suspended uranium manufacturing had failed, and that the Iranians now "pretty much have the knowledge about how to enrich."
US officials disputed that analysis, perhaps with an eye to buying more time in negotiations.
On Monday, ElBaradei modified his statement slightly, saying that "Iran continues steadily to perfect its knowledge relevant to enrichment" and to expand its manufacturing capability.
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