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A suspected secret nuclear bomb factory hidden in the mountains of Iran was revealed today.
US President Barack Obama denounced Tehran for flagrantly breaking rules on acquiring nuclear weapons and threatened heavy punitive sanctions. He demanded Iran give immediate access to UN inspectors.
Speaking alongside Mr Obama at the G20 meeting in Pittsburgh, Gordon Brown issued a starker warning, saying it was time to “draw a line in the sand” over Iran's nuclear ambitions.
While stressing that sanctions were the preferred route, he did not rule out military action.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy gave Iranian leaders two months to comply with international demands or face tough sanctions expected to include financial and technological restrictions.
Western governments including Britain are said to have known for months, if not years, about work to enrich uranium at the plant, which is at a former missile site of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in mountains near the ancient city of Qom.
Iran is understood to have started work on the site, about 100 miles south west of Tehran, in mid-2006 and to have gone to great lengths to keep its existence secret.
Experts fear it will be used to develop a nuclear bomb as it only has a capacity for 3,000 centrifuges which would not be enough, they say, for use for civilian purposes to produce nuclear energy.
Mr Obama warned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Iran had to come clean about its nuclear ambitions.
“The Iranian government must now demonstrate through deeds its peaceful intentions or be held accountable to international standards and international laws,” he said. “This site deepens a growing concern that Iran is refusing to live up to those international responsibilities.”
He warned of a “direct” challenge to the anti-nuclear proliferation rules.
Mr Brown stressed that Iran was now the “most urgent proliferation challenge facing the world today”.
He added: “The level of deception by the Iranian government and the scale of what we believe is the breach of international commitment will shock and anger the whole international community and it will harden our resolve.
“Confronted by the serial deception of many years, the international community has no choice today but to draw a line in the sand.
“We will not let this matter rest.”
Asked about the prospect of military action, he emphasised that the preferred route to deal with Iran was sanctions, but added: “We rule nothing out and never have.”
But one US official said it would be up and running by next year.
Iran has previously owned up to a uranium enrichment plant in an underground complex at Natanz after Iranian exiles blew the whistle on it.
Tehran has always insisted that it is just seeking to develop nuclear energy but the secrecy over the second plant undermines this argument.
Iran is supposed to have stopped all enrichment under threat of sanctions from the UN Security Council.
In a letter on Monday to International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohammed El-Baradei, Tehran confirmed that “a new pilot fuel enrichment plant is under construction”.
The development comes just days before Iran is due to enter fresh talks over its nuclear programme.
The discussions are due to be held in Geneva, or possibly Istanbul, on 1 October with Tehran and the five permanent UN Security Council members — US, UK, Russia, China and France —plus Germany.
Russia recently signalled it might be prepared to soften its opposition to further sanctions against Iran, although China is warning against such steps.
Accusations that the plant under construction was clandestine are “not true,” said a senior Iranian official.
“If it was a covert plant, we would not have informed the (International Atomic Energy) Agency,” he added.
Reader views (3)
We should encourage the Israelis to take out both plants forthwith, and provide them with any assistance they need for this humanitarian mission.
- Professor David Marsland, Reading, UK, 25/09/2009 16:31
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What worries my about all this sabre-rattling is that there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that Iran is not telling the truth and producing only enriched uranium for nuclear power stations. Innuendos and paranoid suspicions are not enough. We went to war against Iraq armed with that sort of "evidence". If the west or Israel attack Iran, then we will need "slam-dunk" indisputable evidence and nothing less. If not, then forget it.
- Graham Rodhouse, Helmond, Netherlands, 25/09/2009 15:44
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Let the Israelis go in and do their thing.
Who were the idiots on this forum who declared that our diplomats walking out on this unelected dictator was wrong? Sitting comfortably at home are you? Not threatened by this Islamic country?
- Frank, Home Counties, England., 25/09/2009 14:40
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