Iran has halted oil shipments to Britain and France, the Iranian oil ministry announced on its website Sunday, a move seen as retaliation for the European Union's decision last month to ramp up sanctions designed to pressure Tehran into resuming talks on its nuclear program.
A statement posted the website shana.ir gave no other details, but it appears to be part of a backlash against the EU for imposing a boycott on Iranian oil beginning in July. The 27-nation EU accounts for about 18 per cent of Iran's oil exports.
The announcement comes the same day that a team of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency went to Tehran for the second time in three weeks. Their visit is another attempt to break more than three years of Iranian stonewalling about allegations that Tehran has — or is — secretly working on nuclear weapons.
At the same time, Iran's Revolutionary Guard began two days of land military exercises to upgrade its capabilities to defend the country against possible external threats.
Commander of the Guard's ground forces Mohammad Pakpour said on comments posted on the force's website sepahnews.com that the manoeuvres dubbed Valfajr, or Dawn, began Sunday outside the city of Yazd in central Iran.
The Guard is Iran's most powerful military unit.
The exercises are the latest in a series of manoeuvres held amid escalating tensions between Iran and the West over Iran's nuclear program. In another development Sunday, Iran's oil ministry website said oil shipments to Britain and France are now on hold.
The U.S. and Israel have not ruled out military strikes against Iran's program, which they say aims at developing weapons technology. Iran says the program is for peaceful purposes.
Iranian Foreign Ministry Ali Akbar Salehi said on Sunday that Tehran was prepared for a "worse-case scenario" as it defends what he maintains is a peaceful nuclear program.
"We plan to move ahead with vigor and confidence and we do not take much heed of [the West's] propaganda warfare. Even in the worst-case scenario, we remain prepared," he said.
New-generation centrifuges could be installed
The diplomats say the Iranian government appears to be ready to install thousands of new-generation centrifuges at its fortified plant near the city of Qom. These machines could greatly speed up production of enriched uranium, material that could be used to build nuclear weapons.
While saying that the electrical circuitry, piping and supporting equipment for the new centrifuges was now in place, the diplomats emphasized that Tehran had not started installing the new machines at its Fordo facility and could not say whether it was planning to.
Still, the senior diplomats — who asked for anonymity because their information was privileged — suggested that Tehran would have little reason to prepare the ground for the better centrifuges unless it planned to operate them. They spoke in recent interviews — the last one Saturday.
The reported work at Fordo appeared to reflect Iran’s determination to forge ahead with nuclear activity that could be used to make atomic arms despite rapidly escalating international sanctions and the latent threat of an Israeli military strike on its nuclear facilities.
Fordo could be used to make fissile warhead material even without such an upgrade, the diplomats said.
They said that although older than Iran’s new generation machines, the centrifuges now operating there can be reconfigured within days to make such material because they already are enriching to 20 per cent — a level that can be boosted quickly to weapons-grade quality.
Their comments appeared to represent the first time anyone had quantified the time it would take to reconfigure the Fordo centrifuges into machines making weapons-grade material.
In contrast, Iran’s older enrichment site at Natanz is producing uranium at 3.4 per cent, a level normally used to power reactors. While that too could be turned into weapons-grade uranium, reassembling from low to weapons-grade production is complex, and retooling the thousands of centrifuges at Natanz would likely take weeks.
Diplomats accredited to the IAEA, meanwhile, expect little from the latest visit by nuclear inspectors. They told the Associated Press that — as before — Iran was refusing to allow the agency experts to visit Parchin, the suspected site of explosives testing for a nuclear weapon and had turned down other key requests made by the experts.
'Premature' to decide on military action
The top U.S. military commander was asked about possible military action against Iran in response to its nuclear program, during an interview with CNN broadcast Sunday.
"I think it would be premature to exclusively decide that the time for a military option was upon us," said Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.
U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague, told the BBC's Andrew Marr Show on Sunday that he doesn't think "the wise thing at this moment is for Israel to launch a military attack on Iran."
Israel has said it will be monitoring two Iranian warships that entered the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal on Saturday. Iran's Mehr news agency says the warships are now docked in Syria's port city of Tartous.
Original Article
Source: CBC
Author: AP
No comments:
Post a Comment