Tehran is pursuing an alternative track to obtaining an atomic weapon, a report by the newspaper ‘Daily Telegraph’ reveals. Tehran is operating a plant that could produce plutonium, satellite images show for the first time, the British daily reports. They reveal that a part of the nuclear site in Arak that has been not been inspected by the UN watchdog IAEA is now operational and apparently already producing materials that could eventually be used to make a nuclear bomb.
The latest photos of the facility suggest that heavy-water production has commenced at the site, based on a cloud of vapor seen rising from a building there. Arak is a heavily guarded facility that contains two main sections: a nuclear reactor and a heavy-water production plant. The reactor has been open to visits from foreign officials, including one that was conducted earlier this month. Work on that reactor is nearly complete, and Iran has said it intends to put it in service next year. However, the heavy-water section of the facility has been off-limits to IAEA inspectors for the past 18 months.
Western governments and the IAEA have held information about activity at Arak for some time, the ‘Daily Telegraph’ article says, but adds that the images “put evidence of that activity into the public domain.”
The photos also show details of the Fordow complex, which is concealed hundreds of feet beneath a mountain near the city of Qom. So far, the international attention has been on Iran’s attempt to enrich uranium to 20 percent purity at the Natanz facility and on Fordow, which happens to be too small for commercial purposes but has the right size for a weapons program.
5+1 talks with Iran in Kazakhstan
At talks in Kazakhstan on Tuesday, world leaders offered to relax sanctions on Iran in exchange for concessions over Fordow, which is heavily protected from any aerial attack, according to the paper. Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States presented the offer at a meeting with Iran in Almaty, and the two sides agreed to hold follow-up technical discussions in Istanbul on 18 March and to reconvene again for a full meeting of diplomats on 5 April.
