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Iran says US nuke documents 'forged'
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-09-05 03:31 The nuclear agency's latest assessment did acknowledge that Iran has been producing nuclear fuel at a slower rate and has allowed UN inspectors broader access to its main nuclear complex in the southern city of Natanz and to a reactor in Arak. But it cautions that there are "a number of outstanding issues which give rise to concerns and which need to be clarified to exclude the existence of possible military dimensions." The report, to be examined next week, has raised the specter of harsher international sanctions against Iran for not answering lingering questions about its nuclear activities. Senior UN officials have said Iran has been feeding uranium ore into some of its 8,300 centrifuges at a reduced rate, suggesting that sanctions already in place may be hampering its program. As of Aug 12, only about 4,600 of those centrifuges were actively enriching uranium, compared with about 4,900 in June - the last time the nuclear agency issued a report on Iran's nuclear activities - officials said. Since then, they said, Iran has installed roughly 1,000 more centrifuges, but it appeared that many were idle. Soltanieh's letter contends the overall assessment on Iran is positive. But he says concerns raised by the US and others have "totally overshadowed and undermined" the steps that Iran has taken to comply with IAEA demands for transparency. President Barack Obama has given Iran something of an ultimatum: Stop enriching uranium - which, if done at a high level, can produce fissile material for the core of a nuclear weapon - or face harsher penalties. In exchange for stopping, it could get trade benefits from six countries that have been engaging it in separate talks: the US, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia. The UN Security Council has imposed sanctions on Iran three times since 2006 for its refusal to freeze uranium enrichment. The sanctions grew from fears that Iran is using the pretext of building a peaceful nuclear energy program to eventually make weapons-grade enriched uranium. The country has also been placed on an international watch list to help limit the importation of nuclear materials, which could make it difficult to procure enough uranium oxide to feed its enrichment program.
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