Word: qum
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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President Barack Obama on Oct. 1 gave Iran two weeks to open its hitherto secret nuclear facility at Qum to inspection. Iran eventually agreed to allow officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to visit the site on Oct. 25. That 10-day gap between what Obama demanded and what Iran was willing to concede symbolizes the looming dilemma for the Administration on Iran nuclear diplomacy - even if a solution is achieved, it's unlikely to be the solution that the West has been demanding...
...What Iran did agree to was inspections at Qum and an arrangement to send low-enriched uranium to Russia to create fuel rods for its medical-research reactor in Tehran. The terms on which those inspections and the deal for enrichment abroad will be implemented remain to be seen. But they may well strengthen safeguards against Iran's turning nuclear material into weapons, even as they bypass the demand for Iran to halt uranium enrichment...
Panetta won't say what kind of covert operations were carried out or how the agency was able to conclude that the Qum facility was nuclear. The counterterrorism officials says only that "our body of knowledge, based on multiple sources, grew to the point that allowed us earlier this year to reach the high-confidence conclusion that this was a covert nuclear facility...
...little doubt left about what exactly was being constructed in the mountain (Iran has declared that the plant is not yet operational, and U.S. officials have agreed with that assessment). That, a senior Administration official told reporters this week, was when the White House decided that knowledge of the Qum facility would be a useful card to put on the table when Iran finally agreed to talk to the six major powers (the U.S., China, Russia, U.K., France and Germany). If the Iranians failed to come to the talks, Obama would reveal the secret facility in his speech...
...been blown that it chose to own up to the plant's existence - although how it might have learned of Washington's discovery remains unclear. On the eve of the U.N. General Assembly last month, the Iranians sent the IAEA a terse note, acknowledging the presence of the Qum facility. The next day, Panetta dispatched a team to the IAEA's headquarters in Vienna to make the presentation...