VIENNA — Defying the international community, Iran has sharply upgraded its capacity to enrich uranium in recent months while the outside world's access to and grasp of Tehran's nuclear program "has deteriorated," according to an unusually blunt report Wednesday by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
As two U.S. aircraft carriers and a flotilla of warships steamed into the Persian Gulf for previously unannounced exercises off Iranian shores, the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency warned that it could not "provide assurances about ... the exclusively peaceful nature" of Tehran's expanding nuclear effort.
Iran has started low-level operation of 1,312 centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium, and has begun testing or is constructing 820 additional centrifuges, in a vast underground chamber at the country's main nuclear facility at Natanz, the report by the Vienna-based IAEA said. The total is more than three times as many centrifuges as Iran had at the facility three months ago.
"What they are doing now is significant," said a senior U.N. official who spoke on condition that he not be identified because the report officially goes to the U.N. Security Council before it may be released. "Their progress is accelerating."
Iran's continued refusal to comply with Security Council demands for an immediate freeze of its nuclear program is likely to spur another round of U.N. economic sanctions, the third set since December. U.S. diplomats and their allies began preparing proposals for stiffer penalties this month in anticipation of a negative report.
Iran's representative to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, disputed portions of the report and said in a telephone interview that Tehran had provided "full cooperation and full transparency" to the U.N. inspectors.
As Iranian officials have in the past, Soltanieh insisted that Tehran's nuclear program would produce only electricity, not, as the West fears, nuclear weapons.
The centrifuges can be used to provide low enriched fuel for civilian reactors, or they can produce the more highly enriched uranium used for nuclear weapons.
"We have continued our activities because this is our inalienable right," the Iranian envoy said. Additional U.N. sanctions, he warned, would "have a negative consequence." He declined to elaborate.
The Bush administration, which has sought to rein in Iran's nuclear program through diplomacy and sanctions, reacted sharply to the latest IAEA report.
