The Associated Press – An Iranian exile group claimed Thursday that Iran is hiding details of its work on a sophisticated type of centrifuge for enriching uranium by constantly shifting the project between military sites.
The National Council of Resistance of Iran, NCRI, also claimed that part of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility in central Iran was set aside for tests on the newer type of centrifuge.
The P2 centrifuge, as it is known, could be used to more speedily create fuel for either power plants or for atomic weapons. Iran has come under intense pressure in recent months to cease any efforts to enrich uranium, and Friday is the U.N. Security Council’s deadline for Tehran to halt them.
“The clerical regime will never abandon nuclear weapons because it considers them to be a strategic guarantee for survival,” Mohammad Mohaddessin, chairman of the NCRI’s foreign affairs committee, said at a Paris news conference.
He said Iran’s goal is to have a “large number of P2s,” adding that he did not know whether one had actually been produced.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said this month that his country is conducting laboratory research on the P-2. Some analysts say Ahmadinejad may have deliberately exaggerated Iran’s capabilities, either to boost his own political support or to persuade the U.N. nuclear watchdog to back off.
At its news conference, the exile group listed experts and companies it claimed were involved in the project. It said supporters inside Iran provided the information but offered no specifics or evidence to back up the claims.
Mohaddessin also said that North Korean and Chinese experts have traveled to check machinery at what it claimed was another P2 research site in Ab-e Ali, north of Teheran.
Iran insists it is only building a civilian nuclear program to satisfy electricity demand, but the United States and many of its allies in Western Europe and Japan fear the Iranians want a nuclear weapon.
NCRI – the political arm of the Mujahedeen Khalq, a group that Washington and the European Union list as a terrorist organization – has a mixed record of accuracy.
Four years ago it disclosed information about two hidden nuclear sites that helped uncover nearly two decades of covert Iranian atomic activity and sparked present fears that Tehran wants to build a bomb.
But most of the information it has presented since then to back up claims that Iran has a secret weapons program has not been publicly verified.
