Word: uranium
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...Security Council finally agreed Wednesday to do something about Iran's nuclear program. Tehran was given 30 days to comply with U.N. inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency and to suspend uranium enrichment activities or face as yet unspecified consequences. The "Presidential statement," which followed several weeks of intense diplomatic wrangling, omitted tougher phrasing, opposed by Russia and China, that would have spelled out more clearly the consequences of failing to comply, but which Russia and China feared would lead to a dangerous escalation in the standoff. The statement received the full backing of the U.S. and the world...
...nuclear program for decades, ever since the U.S. first fed the Shah's appetite for reactors. Experts generally believe that Tehran has 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...
...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...
...this day, Iranian officials assert that their uranium-enrichment activities are purely for energy or research 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...
What Iran seems to be playing for, above all, is time. The longer it can string out the diplomatic process, the further it can proceed down the road toward completing the fuel cycle. It is possible that Iran may even agree to suspend uranium enrichment at some point in the near future, knowing that it has already created new facts on the ground. If the regime were then to change its mind again, says Mark Fitzpatrick, a longtime veteran of the U.S. State Department who is now at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies, "it would resume from...