guardian.co.uk
The US and Iran raised the stakes yesterday ahead of this week's nuclear showdown in Geneva, with threats of global strife if no resolution is found. The sharpened rhetoric followed Friday's revelation that Iran had been building a secret uranium enrichment plant under a mountain near Qom, and it points towards a new wave of sanctions that go far beyond the targeted financial measures imposed on Iran so far. Speaking at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh, Barack Obama declared: "Iran is on notice that when we meet with them on 1 October they are going to have to come clean, and they will have to make a choice." The alternative to sticking to international rules on Iran's nuclear development, he said, would be "a path that is going to lead to confrontation". At the meeting the US will demand access to the plant within the next few days and to all other sites within three months, the New York Times said last night. It will tell Tehran to open all notebooks and computers to inspection and answer questions about its suspected efforts to build a nuclear weapon. But the Iranian government showed no signs yesterday of being prepared to compromise. Instead, the chief of staff to the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, appeared to relish the prospect of confrontation.
"This new plant, God willing, will soon become operational and will make the enemies blind," said Mohammad Mohammadi-Golpayegani, according to the semi-official news agency, Fars. He described the newly revealed enrichment plant as a sign that Iran was at the "summit of power". The remarks reflected the degree to which the Tehran regime has made the nuclear programme a matter of pride and national identity. It insists that the programme, the existence of which was revealed in 2002, is for generating electricity and medical research and is entirely within Iran's sovereign rights. Iran's nuclear chief said yesterday the UN nuclear agency would be allowed to inspect the facility at Qom. But Ali Akbar Salehi did not specify when inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) could visit the site. Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dodged a question at the UN over whether Iran had succeeded in enriching enough uranium to make a bomb, but said nuclear weapons "are inhumane". Anyone who pursued such goals was "retarded politically". Raising tensions further, Iranian media reported yesterday that revolutionary guards would hold missile defence exercises. Western officials say the Qom site is on a revolutionary guard missile base. (Read more...)
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