Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Iran
Completes Secret Uranium Plant
Kenneth R. Timmerman,
NewsMax.com
Friday, April 21,
2006
WASHINGTON -- Just when the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) thought it had its hands around the Iranian nuclear program,
NewsMax has learned from intelligence sources that Iran's
Revolutionary Guards Corps is completing a secret, underground
uranium enrichment plant that should begin operating in October
2006.
Work on the new plant, located 50 miles outside the
northeastern Iranian city of Mashad, was begun with help from Russian
engineers in 2003, Iranian intelligence sources said.
The facility has been built 150 meters below ground in a rugged
highlands valley some 38 kilometers southeast of the city of
Nishabour. The nearest inhabited area is a town named Homa.
A large agricultural center was constructed overhead to
disguise the existence of the buried plant, the sources said. A
similar disguise was initially used to hide the existence of the
Natanz uranium enrichment plant to the southwest of Tehran, before a
foreign government revealed its existence to the IAEA.
Over the last seven months, according to former Iranian army military
analyst Homayoun Moghaddam, now exiled in Europe, scientists and
technicians from Belarus and Ukraine have been working on site to
prepare the new facility to accommodate 155,000 P1 and P2 uranium
enrichment centrifuges.
He said the Revolutionary Guards Intelligence Department, which is in
charge of the facility, refers to it as the Shahid Moradian center,
and that 850 Iranian scientists and technicians are currently working
there, along with 85 experts from Belarus and Ukraine.
Their goal is to enrich enough uranium to build at least nine
nuclear weapons per year, and to keep the site secret for the next
three years, Moghaddam said.
The IAEA has verified previously clandestine production in Iran of
the P1 centrifuge, an older design copied by Pakistan from plans
acquired in Europe in the late 1970s by Dr. A.Q. Khan.
Iran announced last week that it had successfully begun enrichment of
uranium in a cascade of 164 P1 centrifuges at a pilot plant in
Natanz, in defiance of a United Nations Security Council statement
calling on Iran to cease all enrichment activities by April 28.
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also announced last week
that Iran was now capable of producing the more advanced P2
centrifuge, which is considered more efficient and more reliable than
the older P1 design.
Until his announcement, Iranian officials had denied reports that
they had imported P2 centrifuges from the A.Q. Khan network and
claimed that sample P2 centrifuges found in Iran had been produced
experimentally by a private company not working on a government
contract. But these latest reports of a completely separate,
clandestine enrichment facility near Nishabour, if confirmed, would
completely alter the picture the IAEA has constructed of Iran's
nuclear infrastructure.
"I would argue that they have a parallel program of some size,"
said Paul Leventhal, a former U.S. Senate aid and founder of the
Nuclear Control Institute, an independent research and advocacy group
in Washington, D.C.
Leventhal was debating Iran's nuclear programs on the "NewsHour"
program with Jim Lehrer on April 11 before information on the
Nishabour facility was made public.
"I would also caution against a grand deception by Iran to play
into Western perceptions of Iran as being technologically and
industrially backward, and apparently having problems in facilities
that they're letting the IAEA into, while, at unknown locations, they
are proceeding with all the technological help and technology that
money can buy," Leventhal added.
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