Word: iaea
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...coveted the Bomb as well. Under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, signed by Iran in 1968, the country is legally entitled to build reactors and make enriched uranium fuel as a source of energy, as long as it abides by treaty rules and allows the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to monitor what it is doing. Iran has consistently denied that it intends to scale up fuel-grade enriched uranium into the purer weapons-grade component of a bomb. Iranians say they have the same rights as other countries to technology and are just looking out for their long-term energy...
...trouble is, almost no one believes that's all Iran is after. Iran had concealed clandestine efforts to make enriched uranium from IAEA inspectors for two decades, until its secret lab at Natanz was exposed by an exile opposition group in 2002. Iran eventually owned up to the deception, telling the IAEA that since the West had denied Iran reactors for decades, it had to go underground to become self-sufficient in fuel. The revelations led the IAEA to put seals on Iran's test centrifuges while Britain, France and Germany tried to negotiate guarantees that Iran's nuclear program...
...purposes rather than military ones. "There's no place for nuclear weapons in our national security doctrine," Larijani told TIME. He points out that Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei has issued a fatwa forbidding the use of nuclear weapons. But such claims were undermined again in January when the IAEA reported an administrative link between a uranium-conversion program known as Green Salt and efforts to weaponize missiles that, for the first time, appeared to show an attempt to harness the nuclear program for military purposes...
...NECESSARILY. UNDERPINNING THE current air of crisis is uncertainty about how soon Iran could manage bomb production. Western intelligence on the intentions and capabilities of nuclear aspirants is notoriously unreliable. Thus far, the IAEA says, Iran has the knowledge but not the capacity to make weapons. Some experts say that if Iran's enrichment facilities became fully operational, they could churn out enough material to construct two bombs a year. John Negroponte, Director of National Intelligence, said recently that "Iran, if it continues on its current path, will likely have the capability to produce a nuclear weapon within the next...
...influence with the Shi'ite majority in Iraq and the newly elected Hamas leaders in the Palestinian territories. Getting loud and ugly about Israel earns Iran credibility and support in the Muslim world. And the regime may have decided that thumbing its nose at the nonproliferation treaty and at IAEA inspections is worth the international disapprobation, gambling that its extensive commercial ties with Russia and China will insulate it from punitive Security Council measures...