Fresh Doubts Emerge on Obama Administration Claims About Iran's Nuclear Intentions

An Iranian assertion that construction on its second uranium-enrichment facility began only last year and further analysis of satellite photos of the site have cast fresh doubts on the Barack Obama administration's charge that the construction of the plant near the holy city of Qom involved a covert decision to violate Iran's obligations to report immediately to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on any decision to build a new facility.

At a September 25 briefing on the site, senior administration officials refused to provide any specific information to back up the claim that construction had begun before the March 2007 Iranian withdrawal from an agreement requiring that it inform the IAEA immediately of any decision to build a nuclear facility.

The US charges on the Qom facility, coming a week before the first opportunity for negotiations with Iran on a full range of issues since 1981, appear to have been a deliberate ploy to make the Obama administration appear tough and on the offensive when the talks started.

Iran's Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi, who is also the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, told a news conference last Tuesday that his agency took over a military ammunition dump in 2008 to begin work on the enrichment facility near Qom.

Meanwhile, a new photo analysis by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) of the Qom site in 2004 and 2005 suggests it was not dedicated to building a uranium-enrichment facility at that time.

In a brief analysis posted on the ISIS webpage last Tuesday, Paul Brannan, a specialist in interpreting satellite photography at ISIS, said he believed that the site on which the Qom enrichment facility was later constructed was "originally a tunnel facility associated with Iran's military" rather than a "construction site for a uranium plant".

Brannan wrote that there was evidence of some construction between June 2004 and March 2005, but that the pace appeared "slow". That tunneling activity, Brannan wrote, "may not have been originally associated with the later construction activity for the suspected uranium enrichment site".

Brannan told Inter Press Service it is "technically possible" that the relatively slight changes he saw from 2004 to 2005 were associated with the enrichment facility, but said the images of the site at that stage appear similar to many other tunnel facilities built into a mountain that are maintained by the Iranian military.

"The Iranian military has hundreds of these around Iran," Brannan said.

Brannan said he is now in the process of obtaining satellite imagery for 2006 through 2008 in order to establish more clearly when the construction on the facility began.

In his press conference, Salehi described the second enrichment facility as "a small version of Natanz" - Iran's large-scale commercial enrichment plant - and explained it as a measure aimed at ensuring the continuity of the program if its nuclear sites were attacked.

If construction on the Qom site did not begin until 2008, as Salehi claimed, it would have been long after Iran had withdrawn from an agreement with the IAEA - the so-called "modified Code 3.1" - obligating it to report design information on nuclear facilities as soon as the decision is made.

That would further suggest that Iran is serious about remaining in compliance with its obligations under the Safeguards Agreement.

Iran notified the IAEA in March 2007 that it intended to revert to the earlier version of the "Code 3.1" subsidiary arrangement with the agency, which obligated it to provide design information at least 180 days before introduction of nuclear material into the facility. Subsidiary arrangements are codicils to the safeguards agreement - the document that defines the basic transparency and other obligations of each IAEA member state.