TEHRAN: Iran said that it was ready to send its uranium abroad for further enrichment as requested by the UN. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced the decision in an interview with state Iranian television.
He said Iran will have “no problem” giving the West its low-enriched uranium and taking it back several months later when it is enriched by 20 percent. The decision could signal a major shift in the Iranian position on the issue. Still, it was unclear how much of a concession the Ahmadinejad comments represented, even though he appeared to be saying for the first time that Iran was willing to ship out its enriched uranium and wait for it to be returned in the form of fuel for its Tehran research reactor. But his time frame of four or five months appeared to fall short of the year that Western officials say it would take for Iran’s enriched fuel to be turned into fuel rods for the reactor.
If that difference cannot be bridged, it could allow Iranian officials to assert that the deal failed due to Western foot-dragging, despite their readiness to accept the proposed formula of shipping out the bulk of their enriched uranium and waiting for it to be converted and returned as fuel.
Ahmadinejad also did not address whether his country was ready to ship out most of its stockpile in one batch — another condition set by the six world powers endorsing the fuel swap. If Iran were to agree to export most of its enriched uranium in one shipment, it would delay its ability to make a nuclear weapon by stripping it of the material it needs to make the fissile core of a warhead.

TEHRAN : Iran could consider sending its low-enriched uranium abroad, the Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday, apparently softening its opposition to a U.N. plan aimed at keeping a check on its nuclear ambitions.

Last week Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki rejected a U.N.-drafted deal that would see Iran ship low-enriched uranium (LEU) abroad for reprocessing, saying this could only be swapped simultaneously on Iranian soil for fuel for nuclear medicine.But Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said on Tuesday that Iran was not opposed to sending LEU abroad as long as it had “100 percent guarantees” it would receive refined fuel in return, for use in a medical research reactor.”Regarding the guarantees we are not going to suggest anything, but one … could be exchanging it on Iranian soil,” Mehmanparast told a news conference.Any fuel swap in Iran would likely be a non-starter for Western powers, which want to delay Tehran’s potential to make a nuclear bomb by reducing its LEU stockpile. Iran says its nuclear programme is peaceful.

Iran’s top nuclear official said it was up to world powers to find a guarantee that would satisfy Iran.

“The only way is that the West should give us a 100 percent guarantee to make this deal doable. The guarantee should be agreed by Iran,” Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, told Reuters when asked whether Iran’s condition was to do a nuclear transaction only on its territory.Six world powers urged Tehran on Friday to accept the proposal brokered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). U.S. President Barack Obama has warned of more sanctions on Iran, the world’s fifth-largest oil producer.

The powers, increasingly concerned over Iran’s failure to be more open about its plans — underlined by its belated disclosure of a second enrichment site — have drafted a resolution on Iran to discuss at an IAEA meeting later this week, diplomats said on Tuesday.The draft calls on Iran to open up fully to U.N. nuclear inspectors and investigators, clarify the origins and purpose of the hidden enrichment site and confirm it has no more undeclared nuclear plans, the diplomats told Reuters.Russia and China, who have often blocked a tougher stance on Iran by the IAEA’s 35-nation Board of Governors in the past, are fully behind the text along with the United States, Britain, France and Germany, they said.

With Russian and Chinese backing, the measure has a better chance of winning majority support including developing nations on the board in a vote in Vienna on Thursday or Friday.If passed, it would be the first IAEA resolution targeting Iran since February 2006, when the governors referred Tehran to the U.N. Security Council for defying the agency’s requests that it suspend enrichment and open up completely to IAEA probes.

The draft fuel deal calls on Iran to send some 75 percent of its LEU to Russia and France, where it would be turned into fuel for the Tehran reactor, which produces radio-isotopes for cancer treatment but is due to run out of its imported fuel next year.

Western officials say Iran accepted the plan in principle last month, and they suspect that in demanding changes, Tehran is trying to buy time and avert more sanctions, while pressing ahead with nuclear enrichment activity.Some analysts say hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad favours the fuel deal as a way to shore up his legitimacy after his disputed re-election in June, but that domestic rivals are trying to undermine him by criticising the proposal.”Nobody in Iran ever said that we are against sending 3.5 percent (LEU) abroad. We talked about the process of dispatching fuel,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mehmanparast said.

“If we say we are looking for 100 percent guarantees, it means that we want 3.5 percent-enriched uranium to be sent out under such circumstances that we make sure that we will receive” fuel enriched to 20 percent purity for the reactor.

Iran’s nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili echoed the demand for “objective guarantees” on Arabic-language al Alam television.”It is a commercial issue. Iran has asked the (IAEA) to provide it for Iran,” he said. “If they can’t provide fuel in time … we have other options to get fuel.”Western powers agree that Iran has the right to develop a civilian nuclear programme, but want enrichment limits and stronger IAEA inspections to ensure it does not try to enrich uranium to the 90 percent level needed for a nuclear weapon. Iran says its aim is only to generate electricity.

The United States has rejected Iranian calls for amendments and further talks on the deal. Obama has said time is running out for diplomacy to resolve the long-running nuclear standoff.

Iran ruled out sending enriched uranium abroad for further processing, but would consider swapping it for nuclear fuel provided it remained under supervision inside the country.
The decision is expected to anger the United States and its allies, which had called on Iran to accept a deal which aimed to delay Tehran’s potential ability to make bombs by at least a year by divesting Iran of most of its enriched uranium. A draft deal brokered by the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), calls on Iran to send some 75 percent of its low-enriched uranium to Russia and France, Iran Rejects Sending Uranium Abroad, where it would be turned into fuel for a Tehran medical research reactor. “Surely we will not send our 3.5 percent fuel abroad but can review swapping it simultaneously with nuclear fuel inside Iran,” Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told. The United States has rejected Iranian calls for amendments and further talks on the deal. President Barack Obama said time was running out for diplomacy to resolve a long standoff over Iran’s nuclear program. Mottaki criticized Washington for pressuring Iran to accept the deal. “Diplomacy is not black or white. Pressuring Iran to accept what they want is a non-diplomatic approach,” he said. Russia and France, which are both also involved in the fuel proposal, also pressed Iran to accept it as is. Tehran faces possible harsher international sanctions and risks even Israeli military action to knock out its nuclear sites. Iran says it needs nuclear technology to generate power but its history of secrecy and restricting UN inspections have raised Western suspicions of a covert quest for atom bombs.

Senior staff members of the UN nuclear agency have concluded in a confidential analysis that Iran has acquired “sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable” atom bomb.

The report by experts in the International Atomic Energy Agency stresses in its introduction that its conclusions are tentative and subject to further confirmation of the evidence, which it says came from intelligence agencies and its own investigations.

But the report’s conclusions, described by senior European officials, go well beyond the public positions taken by several governments, including the United States.

Two years ago, US intelligence agencies published a detailed report concluding that Tehran halted its efforts to design a nuclear weapon in 2003. But in recent months, Britain has joined France, Germany and Israel in disputing that conclusion, saying the work has been resumed.

A senior US official said last week that the United States was re-evaluating its 2007 conclusions.

The atomic agency’s report also presents evidence that beyond improving upon bomb-making information gathered from rogue nuclear experts around the world, Iran has done extensive research and testing on how to fashion the components of a weapon. It does not say how far that work has progressed.

The report, titled “Possible Military Dimensions of Iran’s Nuclear Program,” was produced in consultation with a range of nuclear weapons experts inside and outside the agency. It draws a picture of a complex program, run by Iran’s Ministry of Defense, “aimed at the development of a nuclear payload to be delivered using the Shahab 3 missile system,” Iran’s medium-range missile, which can strike the Middle East and parts of Europe. The program, according to the report, apparently began in early 2002.

If Iran is designing a warhead, that would represent only part of the complex process of making nuclear arms. Engineering studies would have to turn ideas into hardware. Finally, the hardest part would be enriching the uranium that could be used as nuclear fuel – though experts say Iran has already mastered that task.

While the analysis represents the judgment of the nuclear agency’s senior staff, a struggle has erupted in recent months over whether to make it public. The dispute pits the agency’s departing director, Mohamed ElBaradei, against his own staff and against foreign governments eager to intensify pressure on Iran.

ElBaradei has long been reluctant to adopt a confrontational strategy with Iran, an approach he considers counterproductive. Responding to calls for the report’s release, he has raised doubts about its completeness and reliability.

Last month, the agency issued an unusual statement cautioning it “has no concrete proof” that Iran ever sought to make nuclear arms, much less to perfect a warhead. On Saturday in India, ElBaradei was quoted as saying that “a major question” about the authenticity of the evidence kept his agency from “making any judgment at all” on whether Iran had ever sought to design a nuclear warhead.

Even so, the emerging sense in the intelligence world that Iran has solved the major nuclear design problems poses a new diplomatic challenge for President Barack Obama and his allies as they confront Iran.

US officials say that in the direct negotiations with Iran that began last week, it will be vital to get the country to open all of its suspected sites to international inspectors. That is a long list, topped by the underground nuclear enrichment center under construction near Qum, that was revealed 10 days ago.

Iran has acknowledged that the underground facility is intended as a nuclear enrichment center, but says the fuel it makes will be used solely to produce nuclear power and medical isotopes. It was kept heavily protected, Iranian officials said, to ward off potential attacks.

Iran said last week that it would allow inspectors to visit the site this month. In the past three years, amid mounting evidence of a possible military dimension to its nuclear program, Iran has denied the agency wide access to installations, documents and personnel.

In recent weeks, there have been leaks about the internal report, perhaps intended to press ElBaradei into releasing it.

The report’s existence has been rumoured for months, and On Friday, more detailed excerpts appeared on the Web site of the Institute for Science and International Security, run by David Albright, a nuclear expert. In recent interviews, a senior European official familiar with the contents of the full report described it to The New York Times. He confirmed that Albright’s excerpts were authentic. The excerpts were drawn from a 67-page version of the report written earlier this year and since revised and lengthened, the official said; its main conclusions remain unchanged.

“This is a running summary of where we are,” the official said. “But there is some loose language,” he added, and it was “not ready for publication as an official document.”

Most dramatically, the report says the agency “assesses that Iran has sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable implosion nuclear device” based on highly enriched uranium.

Weapons based on the principle of implosion are considered advanced models compared with the simple gun-type bomb that the United States dropped on Hiroshima. They use a blast wave from a sphere of conventional explosives to compress a ball of bomb fuel into a supercritical mass, starting the atomic chain reaction and progressing to the fiery blast. Implosion designs, compact by nature, are considered necessary for making nuclear warheads small and powerful enough to fit atop a missile.

The excerpts of the analysis also suggest the Iranians have done a wide array of research and testing to perfect nuclear arms, like making high-voltage detonators, firing test explosives and designing warheads.

The evidence underlying these conclusions is not new – some of it was reported in a confidential presentation to many nations in early 2008 by the agency’s chief inspector, Ollie Heinonen.

Iran maintains that its scientists have never conducted research on how to make a warhead. Iranian officials say any documents to the contrary are fraudulent.

But in August, a public report to the board of the IAEA by its staff concluded that the evidence of Iran’s alleged military activity was probably genuine.

It said “the information contained in that documentation appears to have been derived from multiple sources over different periods of time, appears to be generally consistent, and is sufficiently comprehensive and detailed that it needs to be addressed by Iran with a view to removing the doubts” about the nature of its nuclear program.

The agency’s tentative analysis also says that Iran “most likely” obtained the needed information for designing and building an implosion bomb “from external sources” and then adapted the information to its own needs.

It said nothing specific about the “external sources,” but many intelligence agencies assume that Iran obtained a bomb design from AQ Khan, the rogue Pakistani black marketer who sold Iran machines to enrich uranium. That information may have been supplemented by a Russian nuclear weapons scientist who visited Iran often, investigators say.

Shriya Saran, Celina Jaitley, Neetu Chandra, Sameera Reddy, and other bollywood Celebrites at Nishka Lulla’s Label Nishka Launch.