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'Reporting Among Gangsters' - Op-Ed in 'The Washington Post'

RFE/RL President Jeffrey Gedmin examines threats to independent media in Central Asia. More

By Country / Iran

El-Baradei Says Iran's Nuclear Expansion Slowing

July 09, 2007

Muhammad el-Baradei at a meeting of the IAEA's board of governors (AFP)

July 9, 2007 -- The head of the UN's nuclear watchdog agency says Iran has slowed down the expansion of its nuclear enrichment program.

Muhammad el-Baradei told reporters in Vienna today that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had seen "a fairly slow development" in Iran's installation of centrifuge machines.

These can enrich uranium into fuel for nuclear energy reactors, or, when the fuel is refined to a higher degree, nuclear-weapons-grade material.

Despite Tehran's denials, western powers suspect Iran's nuclear program is secretly aimed at producing nuclear weapons.

(Reuters, AFP)

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Talking Technical

A control panel at the Bushehr nuclear power plant (Fars)

CASCADES AND CENTRIFUGES: Experts and pundits alike continue to debate the goals and status of Iran's nuclear program. It remains unclear whether the program is, as Tehran insists, a purely peaceful enegy project or, as the United States claims, part of an effort to acquire nuclear weapons.
On June 7, 2006, RFE/RL correspondent Charles Recknagel spoke with nuclear expert Shannon Kile of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute in Sweden to help sort through some of the technical issues involved. "[Natanz] will be quite a large plant," Kile said. "There will be about 50,000 centrifuges and how much enriched uranium that can produce [is] hard to say because the efficiency of the centrifuges is not really known yet. But it would clearly be enough to be able to produce enough [highly-enriched uranium] for a nuclear weapon in fairly short order, if that's the route that they chose to go...." (more)