Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who previously served as Trump’s CIA director and ordered new operations to disrupt Iran’s nuclear progress, told the United Nations Security Council on Tuesday that Iran’s advanced centrifuges posed a threat. .
“Iran is also accumulating dangerous knowledge,” he said, arguing for an extension of an arms embargo on Tehran that expires in October. “Late last year, Iran announced that its scientists were working on a new centrifuge, IR-9, which would allow Tehran to enrich uranium up to 50 times faster than the IR-1 centrifuges allowed” under the era agreement. Obama.
A Middle East intelligence official, who would not be quoted by name because he was discussing very close information, said the explosion was caused by an explosive device placed inside the facility. The explosion, he said, destroyed much of the overhead parts of the facility where the new centrifuges, delicate devices that spin at supersonic speeds, are balanced before putting them into operation.
David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a nonprofit group in Washington that tracks nuclear proliferation, said in an interview that various factors suggested that the disaster was likely an act of sabotage.
The existence of the facility was no secret: the Iranians promoted its opening in June 2018, and the Albright Institute described the plant in a report. The Iranians published a brilliant image in a report last year.
The assembly plant is unlikely, Albright said, to have stored the types of highly combustible materials that could generate a large explosion. Iranian images of the plant launched last year show the assembly of the centrifuges – tall, thin machines that enrich or concentrate the rare component of uranium, uranium 235.
Enriched to around 3 percent, the fuel can be used in nuclear reactors; 90 percent can power atomic bombs. Iran has insisted that its operations are entirely for civilian purposes, but both U.S. intelligence evaluations and a treasure trove of documents stolen by Israel from an Iranian warehouse in January 2018 showed evidence of nuclear weapons work planning.
