I.A.E.A. Suspects Iranian Nuclear Weapons Activity

WASHINGTON — The United Nation’s nuclear inspectors declared for the first time on Thursday that extensive information they have collected raised concerns about “past or current undisclosed activities” by Iran’s military to develop a nuclear weapon. The unusually strongly worded conclusion seems certain to accelerate Iran’s confrontation with much of the rest of the world.

Their comments were contained in a report to the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the first accounting under the agency’s new head, Yukiya Amano.

The report also concluded that Iran’s weapons-related activity apparently continued “beyond 2004,” contradicting an American intelligence assessment published a little over two years ago that concluded that work was suspended at the end of 2003. While the intelligence agencies have never renounced that conclusion, several of President Obama’s top national security advisers have questioned it. Many in the Bush administration also doubted that conclusion.

The report contains no assessment of how long it would take Iran to produce a nuclear weapon, something that Iran denies it is trying to do, saying its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only. As recently as early last month, administration officials said they believed it would be a year and a half, or maybe significantly longer, before Iran could become a nuclear power. But the report cited several pieces of new evidence, much of it collected in recent weeks, that appeared to paint a picture of a concerted drive in Iran toward a weapons capability.

The report said that Iranian officials gave inspectors, who visited the country last week, evidence that the country had successfully enriched uranium to 20 percent purity — well above current levels but still far below the level of enrichment used in a nuclear weapon. So far, the report said, the amounts enriched to the 20 percent level — which Iran says it needs for a research reactor that makes medical isotopes — are tiny.

But the report also said that Iran had moved the vast majority of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium into the plant doing the enrichment. It is a curious move. On the one hand, it seems to suggest that the country is preparing to convert all of its stockpile to a higher level of purity, one that could be further enriched to bomb-grade in a matter of months. But the facility where it has been moved is above ground, leaving the stockpile far more vulnerable to military attack.

Perhaps the most startling revelation in the report is that for the first time Iran told inspectors it was preparing to make its uranium into a metallic form — a step that can be explained by some civilian applications, but is widely viewed as necessary for making the core of an atom bomb. The report does not say what explanation the Iranians offered, if any, for the activity.

Mr. Amano’s attitude toward Iran has been closely watched. Some officials were concerned that the former Japanese diplomat would be unwilling to directly confront the Iranians in his first months in office. But as one American official said on Thursday, “it’s been clear to us that he recognizes the severity of what’s going on.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/world/middleeast/19iran.html?hp