What were you expecting?
VIENNA, Feb. 27 — Iran has accelerated its nuclear fuel enrichment activities and rejected demands of international inspectors to explain evidence that had raised suspicions of a nuclear weapons program, according to a report by a United Nations agency. That could make it easier for the United States and its European partners to seek punitive action in the Security Council.
But the assessment, contained in an 11-page report released Monday by Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, made no definitive judgment about whether the program was peaceful, or intended to create the capacity to produce weapons. That surprised some governments and even some agency officials who had predicted that the report would be harsher.
The report laid out a long list of fresh examples in which it said Iran had stonewalled the agency, responding with incomplete and ambiguous answers and refusing repeated requests to turn over documents and information.
It called it "regrettable and a matter of concern" that Iran has not been more forthcoming after three years of intensive agency verification.
In an indication that Iran is prepared to take a tougher line against the agency and even against the United States, Iran told inspectors on Sunday that documents obtained by American intelligence suggesting links between Iran's nuclear activities and its missile program were forgeries, the report said.
The documents make reference to a secretive entity in Iran called the Green Salt Project, and seem to suggest that the project established "administrative interconnections" between Iran's uranium processing, high explosives and missile warhead design. If accurate, the documents would be the first to tie what Iran says is its purely civilian nuclear program to military activities.
But those allegations "are based on false and fabricated documents," Iranian authorities were quoted as telling an agency inspection team on Sunday, an assertion that came after months of pledges by Iran to provide information on the matter. They also declared that no such project had ever existed.
The report, released to the 35 countries that sit on the agency's decision-making board, also left unclear whether the Iranians had taken possession of copies of the disputed Green Salt documents, which would seem to be a necessary step if Tehran were to subject them to serious forensic examination and pass judgment on their authenticity.
But the shift in the Iranian position seemed intended to call into question the reliability of American intelligence reports on Iran, and to remind the international community of the far-reaching American intelligence failure in overstating Iraq's nuclear program in the months before the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
A senior administration official in Washington, who declined to speak on the record because of the delicate nature of the intelligence, said that Iran had been shown only a limited number of documents from the laptop computer that American intelligence agencies had obtained from an Iranian source.
"We knew they would question the credibility of the intelligence," the official said, "but the other countries that have seen it can judge for themselves."
In another development, Iran informed the agency that it was planning at the end of this year to set up 3,000 centrifuges that enrich uranium as it moves toward industrial-scale enrichment, ignoring international demands that it return to a freeze on its uranium enrichment activities at its vast facility at Natanz, the report said. That would be enough to make a weapon if all technical problems were resolved.
The site is eventually to hold 50,000 of the machines, which would give Iran the technical ability to purify large amounts of uranium for either nuclear reactors or atomic bombs.
The report also documents a number of contradictions between claims by Iranian authorities and the inspectors' evidence.
An example of the serious discrepancies found by the atomic agency center on Iranian research on plutonium, one of the main fuels of nuclear arms. The report said the agency took a number of Iranian plutonium disks to Vienna for analysis of their makeup.
The investigators found a major disagreement between the disks and what was said to be the solution from which they were made. The analysis revealed that eight of the disks had "significantly lower" amounts of plutonium 240. That finding is important because plutonium 240 is considered a pollutant in the making of nuclear arms, and nuclear engineers work hard to limit its presence.
The report made no link between the plutonium 240 finding and its potential usefulness for making nuclear arms. Rather, in the agency's usual understated style, it simply noted the discrepancy. ????
"The story is not as straight as it has been presented to us," said a senior official with knowledge of the agency's investigation.
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