US led efforts to stop Iran acquiring nuclear weapons descended into chaos today as it emerged that Iran had rejected proposals to ship enriched uranium out of the country to prevent Tehran from processing it to weapon’s grade and the US National Intelligence Council (NIC) indicated a merely partial reversal of its infamous 2007 “estimate” that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons programme in 2003.

Iran’s rejection of the uranium plan was conveyed to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna while developments at the NIC emerged from an exclusive report by the Reuters news agency which quoted unnamed officials as saying they now believed that Iran was researching a nuclear weapons programme but not necessarily developing one:

“Basically, we’re talking about research (resuming) — not about the Iranians barrelling full steam ahead on a bomb program,” a U.S. official was quoted by Reuters as saying on condition of anonymity.

Taking these two developments together, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Western policy on Iran’s nuclear programme has all but fallen apart.

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The Times of London claims a world exclusive today with a report saying the paper has obtained secret documentation which proves that Iran is working on a nuclear bomb.

According to the Times: “The notes, from Iran’s most sensitive military nuclear project, describe a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator, the component of a nuclear bomb that triggers an explosion. Foreign intelligence agencies date them to early 2007, four years after Iran was thought to have suspended its weapons programme.”

And, the paper continues: “The technical document describes the use of a neutron source, uranium deuteride, which independent experts confirm has no possible civilian or military use other than in a nuclear weapon. Uranium deuteride is the material used in Pakistan’s bomb, from where Iran obtained its blueprint.”

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Anyone who has followed developments in Russia over the last few years had to be sceptical that the Obama administration’s decision to scrap missile defence facilities in central and eastern Europe would really yield the hoped for response from Moscow in securing meaningful sanctions against Iran.

Appeasement would never work, we all said. Isn’t it blindingly obvious that the people who run modern Russia see themselves as locked in a zero sum, geo-political game with America and the wider West?
Didn’t Obama understand that Moscow sees the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran as negative for the United States but neutral or positive for Russia?

Still, there was always that nagging sensation of doubt. Surely, given the stakes, Obama would not humiliate staunch American allies like the Czechs and the Poles without a cast iron commitment from Russia to shift its position on Iran. Surely the Russians had been persuaded that they must now come into line allowing the prospect of serious sanctions to at least be put on the table. Surely the scrapping of missile defence was part of a grand bargain even if, following diplomatic protocol, the Americans would never say so publicly. Surely Obama knew what he was doing.

Yesterday, that debate appeared to come to an end with the following words from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at a meeting in Moscow with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: “We are convinced,” he said, “that threats, sanctions, and threats of pressure in the present situation are counter-productive.”

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The urgency of the Iranian nuclear situation has been taken up another notch this weekend by revelations that the UN’s top nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), now believes that the Islamist regime has “sufficient information to be able to design and produce a workable” nuclear weapon.

The revelations came to light in a report on Saturday in the New York Times and provide further evidence that Tehran has been engaged in a consistent policy of public decpetion over its plans to acquire nuclear weapons. According to the paper:

“The atomic agency’s report also presents evidence that beyond improving upon bomb-making information gathered from rogue nuclear experts around the world, Iran has done extensive research and testing on how to fashion the components of a weapon. It does not say how far that work has progressed.”

The report appears to contradict a controversial analysis put out by US intelligence services in 2007 which argued that Iran had put its nuclear weapons programme on ice as far back as 2003.

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