A new assessment of Iran’s nuclear programme by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says that, as early as 1995, Pakistan was providing Tehran with the designs for sophisticated centrifuges capable of making bomb-grade nuclear fuel. It also finds evidence that, as of the middle of last month, Iran had assembled and tested the key components for 70 of the machines, which it showed to inspectors from the agency. But the report, issued on Wednesday to IAEA member countries, provided no new evidence of the kind of covert programmes that the agency has discovered over the past year, and suggested that the Iranian government was slowly becoming more helpful to inspectors. That assessment, US officials said, was likely to discourage moves by the Bush administration to take Iran to the Security Council for sanctions unless it dismantles its programme, which the Iranians say is entirely peaceful and which the US says is designed to produce nuclear weapons.The report, issued under the name of the IAEA director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei, notes Iranian plans to conduct an industrial-scale test of a facility that converts raw uranium into nuclear fuel. Iranian officials, the IAEA reported, plan to turn 37 tons of nearly-raw uranium, called ‘‘yellowcake’’, into uranium hexafluoride. That, in turn, is poured into the centrifuges for enrichment.The report states that Iran received the design for an advanced centrifuge, called a ‘‘P-2’’ because it was a second-generation machine designed in Pakistan, as early as 1995. US intelligence officials have said they had no evidence, throughout the 1990s, that Iran was receiving aid from Pakistan, so the IAEA’s findings suggest what one senior intelligence official called ‘‘a fairly major failure, despite the fact that we were watching Iran and Pakistan quite closely’’. —(NYT)
