Word: bushehr
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...have been growing stronger in the last few months. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveiled on April 9 a revamped centrifuge capable of enriching uranium at faster speeds that, according to the State Department, would be unnecessary for peaceful nuclear power. The Arak heavy water plant and the Bushehr atomic reactor, both almost completed, could combine to produce dangerous quantities of plutonium for nuclear warheads. Furthermore, according to the “Weekly Standard,” a thus far unreleased report by the International Atomic Energy Agency documents that Iran was recently testing sophisticated weapons technology for nuclear...
...unilateral sanctions with which the U.S. wants to supplement U.N. efforts - Russia has yet to offer any clear support for new sanctions. And even while Secretary Clinton was in Moscow last week, the Russian government affirmed that it intends to fulfill its contract to bring Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactor online in June despite U.S. objections. (See pictures of Iran's presidential elections and their turbulent aftermath...
Moscow is, however, using its own leverage to press Tehran to be more accommodating. Last Monday, its energy minister Sergei Shmatko announced that the nuclear reactor being built by Russia at Bushehr won't go online by its December 2009 deadline. (The reactor was first scheduled to begin producing electricity in the year 2000, and has been delayed five times since then.) Moscow has further annoyed Tehran by stalling on the delivery of the sophisticated S-300 air defense system ordered by Iran, whose deployment would make life difficult for any air force to attack the Islamic Republic. (See pictures...
Shmatko cited "technical reasons" for the Bushehr delay, but no one in Iran missed the signal. "The Russians are insincere and very unreliable and de facto using the Bushehr case as a political tool for realizing their interests with the West," Mahmoud Ahmadi-Biqash, spokesman of Iran's parliamentary foreign policy and security commission told an Iranian news service...
...curtail U.S. plans for a missile-defense shield in Eastern Europe as a quid pro quo. The Administration has also asked Syria and China to pressure Iran, but the diplomatic focus remains on Russia, which is helping Iran complete its first nuclear reactor in the southern port city of Bushehr, scheduled to go on line this summer. Iran claims its nuclear program is solely for peaceful electricity generation...