Nuclear boast

last updated 8 January 2015

Tehran, Iran

Iran claims it is churning out nuclear centrifuges and will soon be able to enrich enough uranium to run a power plant—or make bombs. “Our dear country is now among the countries of the world that produce nuclear fuel on an industrial scale,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared this week. Enriching uranium would be a violation of U.N. resolutions that have ordered Iran to stop its nuclear programs. But Western experts said they doubted Iran had really started large-scale enrichment. By building the centrifuges, “Ahmadinejad is trying to demonstrate facts on the ground and negotiate from a stronger position,” said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security. But actually enriching industrial amounts of uranium would “destroy the ability to go forward on any negotiation.”