Interesting "oversight" in Iran

Con Coughlin:

With each week that passes, Iran's ayatollahs move closer to their goal of building an atom bomb.

This is not misinformed propaganda pumped out by trigger-happy yahoos on the wilder fringes of America's Republican Party. This is the opinion of the dedicated teams of nuclear experts attached to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, whose task it is to sift through the highly complex science surrounding Iran's nuclear programme and to provide a considered judgment to the UN Security Council on the Iranians' ultimate objectives.

During three years of painstaking negotiations with Iran, Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel peace laureate who heads the IAEA, went out of his way to play along with the charade that Iran's nuclear ambitions were entirely peaceful and designed to develop an indigenous nuclear power industry. This, after all, is a country with known oil reserves in excess of 90 billion barrels, more than enough to meet its energy needs well into the next century.

Mr ElBaradei was even prepared to accept at face value the Iranians' shame-faced admission that their failure to disclose the existence of their massive nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz was no more than a bureaucratic oversight.

When the inspectors were finally granted admission, they were dumb-founded to find themselves in a 250,000-acre complex containing two vast underground bomb-proof bunkers designed for enriching uranium to weapons grade.

Mr ElBaradei is now prepared to concede that the Iranians have run out of excuses, and Teheran has been given until April 29 to implement a total freeze on its nuclear enrichment activities at Natanz and its other key plants, or face the wrath of the Security Council.

At the same time the IAEA's nuclear specialists are working on a report that will be submitted to the UN on the same day, in which they will state explicitly their concerns about Iran's nuclear programme.

But to judge by the Iranians' response so far, the threat of international condemnation and isolation does not appear to be causing sleepless nights.

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There is much more.