US reveals details of Iran's nuclear ambition

Telegraph

Britain and key European allies are using intelligence briefings to convince major powers that Iran is trying to develop nuclear warheads for its Shahab-3 missiles.

The Shahab 3, displayed at a Teheran military parade in September with slogans such as "We will crush America under our feet", has a range of at least 810 miles and is capable of reaching Israel, Turkey, Russia and India.

Aware of the damage done by Downing Street's dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be non-existent, European governments have been careful not to go public with the information.

But in private sessions ahead of today's meeting of the governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, European officials are stressing they believe US intelligence provides strong evidence of Teheran's determination to build an atomic bomb.

US officials have in recent months shared with experts from the IAEA and other countries classified details of tens of thousands of pages of technical information recovered from a stolen Iranian laptop.

The documents, written in Farsi and obtained last year, are said to reveal experiments with warhead designs characteristic of nuclear devices.

But several countries are treating any US intelligence claim with suspicion, prompting Britain, France and Germany - the so-called EU-3 countries that have led the nuclear negotiations with Iran - to join the US lobbying effort.

"The Europeans' assessment is very close to that of the Americans," said a western source. "They have gone through all the possibilities - conventional, chemical or biological weapons. But the designs only make sense if they are intended for a nuclear warhead."

According to leaks in US papers, the documents include telltale details such as a sphere of detonators of conventional explosives, used to compress fissile material to trigger a nuclear reaction.

Iran insists that it wants to build nuclear reactors to generate electricity.

But the IAEA says that Iran has failed to co-operate fully with its inspectors after they discovered in 2003 that Iran had lied about its activities.

Until now attention has focused on Iran's uranium enrichment programme, supposedly intended to produce nuclear fuel. But more recent evidence appears to point to Iran's interest in weapons design. In its latest report, the IAEA revealed that Iran had surrendered a document on how to cast uranium into hemispheres.

Iran said the document was "unsolicited", and had been included with other technical material bought from the nuclear black market.

European officials say the revelation was one of several "own goals" by an increasingly radical Iranian regime.

Its hardline new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, provoked international outrage last month after declaring that Israel "should be wiped off the map". The European briefings are part of a diplomatic campaign to draw influential members of the IAEA board - such as Russia, China, India and South Africa - into a more united front to curb Iran's nuclear programme.

In September, their opposition stopped western countries from pushing the IAEA board to report Iran to the Security Council for possible sanctions. Instead, the board voted on a resolution declaring Iran to be in "non compliance" with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.