Government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham today said Tehran has no problems in connection with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and that "the IAEA's activities in Iran go on."
Iran's parliament voted to "revise its cooperation" with the IAEA after the UN Security Council imposed sanctions on Iran in December over its nuclear program.
The IAEA said Iran's move does not handicap its monitoring of a plant where Iran plans soon to expand its output of nuclear fuel from an experimental to an industrial scale. The expansion is in defiance of the UN Security Council resolution on Iran's nuclear program.
The West accuses Iran of wanting to build nuclear weapons, while Tehran insists it aims only to generate electricity.
(Reuters)
Talking Technical
CASCADES AND CENTRIFUGES: Experts and pundits alike continue to debate the goals and status of Iran's nuclear program. It remains unclear whether the program is, as Tehran insists, a purely peaceful enegy project or, as the United States claims, part of an effort to acquire nuclear weapons.
On June 7, 2006, RFE/RL correspondent Charles Recknagel spoke with nuclear expert Shannon Kile of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in Sweden to help sort through some of the technical issues involved. "[Natanz] will be quite a large plant," Kile said. "There will be about 50,000 centrifuges and how much enriched uranium that can produce [is] hard to say because the efficiency of the centrifuges is not really known yet. But it would clearly be enough to be able to produce enough [highly-enriched uranium] for a nuclear weapon in fairly short order, if that's the route that they chose to go...." (more)
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THE COMPLETE STORY: RFE/RL's complete coverage of controversy surrounding Iran's nuclear program.