IRAN PLANS to test-fire missiles capable of hitting targets across the Middle East today, in a show of defiance before Thursday’s pivotal talks on the country’s nuclear programme.
The test of the Shahab-3, following trials of short-range missiles yesterday, is likely to raise tensions across the region.
Iran claims the missile, based on a North Korean design, has a range of 2,500km – far enough to reach Israel and Iran’s other Middle East rivals Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
The missile tests, carried out by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, come days before a critical encounter in Geneva between Iranian officials and senior diplomats from the US, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China.
The meeting was to have been a final attempt to find a compromise on Iran’s uranium enrichment programme, which Tehran is expanding despite a string of UN Security Council resolutions calling for it to be halted. The stakes at the meeting have been raised further by the revelation last week that Iran was secretly building an enrichment plant under a mountain near the holy city of Qom.
Western officials said at the weekend that Iran would now have to do far more than suspend enrichment to avoid potentially devastating economic sanctions.
“The bar is now higher,” said a British official. “If you think of it in terms of a deficit of trust, Iran’s deficit has just got much bigger and they will have to do much more now to convince the world they do not have a weapons programme.”
The hunt is already on for other sites in what western officials suspect may be a complete shadow nuclear programme. Nuclear analysts say it would have been almost impossible for the Iranians to divert uranium fuel to the Qom enrichment facility from its conversion plant in Isfahan without being spotted by the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, which constantly monitors Isfahan.
It is therefore believed Iran could be hiding a second, covert conversion plant, capable of turning milled uranium ore, known as yellowcake, into uranium hexafluoride gas. That is the form which allows the most fissile isotope – uranium-235, used for power generation and weapons – to be purified in the massed centrifuges of an enrichment plant.
Western officials say there are other suspect sites around Iran and the Iranian government will be told in Geneva that it must give IAEA inspectors access to those sites to escape punitive measures.
“My offer of a serious, meaningful dialogue to resolve this issue remains open,” US president Barack Obama said in his weekly radio address, “but Iran must now co-operate fully with the International Atomic Energy Agency and take action to demonstrate its peaceful intentions.”
The New York Times reported yesterday that the US wanted IAEA access to the Qom plant “within weeks”. Tehran had said it would allow inspectors to see the plant but did not say when.
The list of demands to be presented to Iran on Thursday will also include a long-standing IAEA request to see the Kalaye Electric Company factory near Tehran, where centrifuge components are made.
Iran will also be required to make key scientists available for interview, particularly Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, whom western officials believe ran, or still runs, secret efforts aimed at building a nuclear warhead.
Few expect Iran to comply with the demands.
Tehran insists its programme is for entirely civilian purposes and that the demands are an infringement of its sovereign rights. It admitted to the existence of the Qom plant in a letter to the IAEA, but denies that it was forced into disclosure by the discovery of the secret enrichment facility by western intelligence agencies.
In the absence of Iranian concessions, a debate will begin among the six nations in the negotiating group over what kind of sanctions to impose.– (Guardian service)