Iran has secret underground nuke facility

NY Times:

 President Obama and the leaders of Britain and France will accuse IranFriday of building a secret underground plant to manufacture nuclear fuel, saying it has hidden the covert operation from international weapons inspectors for years, according to senior administration officials.

The revelation, which the three leaders will make before the opening of the Group of 20 economic summit here, appears bound to add urgency to the diplomatic confrontation with Iran over its suspected ambitions to build anuclear weapons capability. Mr. Obama, along with Prime MinisterGordon Brown of Britain and PresidentNicolas Sarkozy of France, will demand that the country allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to conduct an immediate inspection of the facility, which is said to be 100 miles southwest of Tehran.

American officials say that they have been tracking the covert project for years, but that Mr. Obama decided to make public the American findings after Iran discovered, in recent weeks, that Western intelligence agencies had breached the secrecy surrounding the project. On Monday, Iran wrote a brief, cryptic letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency, saying that it now had a “pilot plant” under construction, whose existence it had never before revealed.

...

American officials said they expected the announcement would put the Iranians on the defensive, and that it will make it easier to build a case for international sanctions against Tehran if the country blocks inspectors or refuses to halt its nuclear program.

“They have cheated three times,” one senior administration official with access to the intelligence said of the Iranians late on Thursday evening. “And they have now been caught three times.”

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I doubt that much will change.  The past cheating has not motivated the Russians and Chinese to go along with sanctions and I do not have much confidence this revelation will change their attitude.  I think they like the fact that Iran is doing this.

Perhaps it will motivate Obama to realize it is futile to chat with the Iranians about their nuclear ambitions.  He certainly has more confidence in his BS than I do.