Word: uranium
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...brazen step certain to aggravate the nuclear crisis between Iran and the West, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced Monday his country was now capable of industrial scale uranium enrichment. The declaration carried the hallmarks of the president's theatrical, defiant speeches, styled to show off Iran's tough posture and encourage a sense of nationalist pride among ordinary Iranians. "With great pride, I declare that as of today our country has joined the nuclear club of nations," Ahmadinejad said, speaking before a great billboard of the Iranian flag encircled by the symbol for nuclear energy. The next day Iranian newspapers...
...Despite announcing the completion of 3,000 centrifuges - as a precursor to its intended installation of the 54,000 it plans to array for nuclear fuel production - the capacity to enrich uranium to weapons grade still appears to be years away. As recently as March 5, Dr. Mohamed El Baradei, head of the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog organization, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said his agency's inspectors "have not seen concrete proof of the industrial capacity to produce weapon-usable nuclear material." Weeks earlier, the IAEA had said that Iran remained some time away from even the capacity...
...Instead, on that day, the fiery Iranian leader muted his tone and appealed for dialogue with the West, evidently hoping to stave off a second U.N. Security Council resolution imposing sanctions over Iran's failure to heed its demand to suspend uranium-enrichment activities. But on March 24, the Security Council unanimously voted to expand the sanctions, and now Tehran has reverted to defiance...
...leaders believe North Korea forced the international community to sweeten its offers of aid and security guarantees by building and testing nuclear devices, Kerr says. He believes Tehran is probably bluffing and exaggerating its prowess in order to render moot the Western drive to preclude Iran from keeping any uranium-enrichment capability on its own soil...
...need to hear from the inspectors to know for sure, but it sounds to me as though Iran has not yet gotten in its enrichment program as far as it has been proclaiming. Yes, they are making progress, and yes, it is a new stage to be enriching uranium in the underground production-scale facility. But to call it industrial-scale enrichment is a boast...