Diplomats are leery of Iranian plant

VIENNA - Iran's recently revealed uranium enrichment hall is a highly fortified underground space that appears too small to house a civilian nuclear program, but large enough to serve for military activities, diplomats said yesterday.

Iran began building the facility near the holy city of Qom seven years ago, and after bouts of fitful construction could finish the project in a year, the diplomats said in interviews.

Both the construction timeline and the size of the facility - inspected last month by the International Atomic Energy Agency - are significant in helping shed light on Tehran's true nuclear intentions.

Iran says it wants to enrich only to make atomic fuel for energy production, but the West fears it could retool its program to churn out fissile warhead material.

One of the diplomats - a senior official from a European nation - said the enrichment hall is too small to house the tens of thousands of centrifuges needed for peaceful industrial nuclear enrichment, but is the right size to contain the few thousand advanced machines that could generate the amount of weapons-grade uranium needed to make nuclear warheads.

In Brussels, Belgium, yesterday, the leader of an Iranian opposition group in exile, said the regime is making sweeping changes to its security apparatus to consolidate the power of the elite Revolutionary Guard and give even greater control to the nation's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Maryam Rajavi, head of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, said the changes and accompanying purges stem from worries about the loyalty of the security forces as the nation experiences its most significant unrest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The Paris-based group is deemed to be a terrorist organization by the United States but not Europe.

Some of its claims, including one revealing the existence of an older uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, have been borne out.

The Revolutionary Guard, directly controlled by Khamenei, has in recent years expanded its influence into key economic and technological sectors, including the nation's nuclear program. It operates independently of the armed forces and maintains a nationwide network of militia groups, known as Basij.

"The new organization will be directly controlled by Khamenei [and] will not be dependent on the president or the Majlis [parliament]," she told reporters.

As for the nuclear facility near Qom, the diplomats said satellite imagery indicated that Iran started building the plant in 2002, paused for two years in 2004 - the same year it suspended enrichment on an international demand - and resumed construction in 2006, when enrichment was also restarted.

Since then, Iran has defied three sets of U.N. Security Council sanctions aimed at forcing it to again freeze uranium enrichment.

All of the diplomats have access to information compiled by the IAEA, and demanded anonymity to discuss confidential matters.

Iran informed the IAEA only in September that it was building the facility near Qom, leading U.S., British and French leaders to denounce it for keeping the plant secret. IAEA inspectors visited it last month.

The Natanz facility, revealed in 2002, has grown to house 9,000 centrifuges and has churned enough low-enriched uranium to turn into material for one or two nuclear warheads.

Low-enriched material is suitable for what Iran says will be a nationwide nuclear power grid. But that stockpile can be enriched further to weapons-grade material.

Because the Natanz centrifuges are antiquated, Iran is able to use only about 5,000 of them and the plant's output of low-enriched uranium has stagnated, the senior diplomat said. In contrast, the facility near Qom appears designed to shelter fewer but more modern models configured to churn out more enriched material faster.