IAEA: Iran going nuclear

Vienna, Austria--The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported to the UN Security Council in an emergency meeting Saturday that Iran's nuclear program may not be intended "exclusively for peaceful purposes." The IAEA, in making its report, referred Iran to the Security Council for possible economic sanctions or military action. However, any response to this referral will be several weeks away at the soonest, as Security Council member nations Russia and China only agreed to take up the matter on the condition that the coucil take no action before March.
Of the 35 IAEA member nations, 27 voted for the referral, with only Cuba, Venezuela (whose leader, dictator Hugo Chavez, is backing Cindy Sheehan for Senate from California), and Syria voting against it.
The precise wording of the resolution was reached early Saturday morning, only hours before the meeting. The United States, after holding fast on the issue for some time, was finally forced to capitulate to Egypt and several European nations, and support a "nuclear-weapons free" zone in the Middle East. This benign-sounding clause in practice would equate Israel's nuclear capability to that of Iran in terms of legality, an issue which the US strongly opposed, as America has long supported Israel as a protagonist in the region and currently views Iran as a threat--thus making it difficult to justify equating each's rationale for having nuclear capabilities. The full text of the IAEA resolution can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/international/20060204resolution.pdf
Iran responded immediately to the IAEA's referral of its program to the Security Council by ejecting UN inspectors, breaking UN seals on nuclear facilities, and began resuming full-scale uranium enrichment, a process which can produce the fission necessary for a nuclear warhead. "As of Sunday, the voluntary implementation of the additional protocol and other cooperation beyond the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty has to be suspended under the law," said Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Russia had offered to provide facilities in its own territory for Iran to enrich uranium as a means to help Iran convince the world of the peacefulness of its intention, but after the Security Council referral, Tehran released a statement calling the deal "effectively dead," and announcing the resumption of enrichment in its own Natanz facility.
At the Security Council meeting the new Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, compared Iran's nuclear plans to the threat of the Nazis in their early days, as top U.S. officials urged a tough stance against the rogue state. U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld called the militant Islamic state "the world's leading sponsor of terrorism," a charge his Iranian counterpart called "ridiculous" and "outrageous."

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