Iran’s Nuclear Program Hits Roadblocks

Iran’s nuclear program, once thought to have its sights set on producing a bomb by 2000, has run into roadblocks and won’t hit its weapons target until well into the next decade, Israeli and other sources report.

“They are going to make it in the end,” a senior Israeli intelligence official said, “but it will be the middle of the next decade.”

The receding timetable, the result in part of U.S. pressure on Iran’s nuclear suppliers, could ease international concern that Israel will follow through on threats to attack Iran’s nuclear sites.

The Iranians deny they want to build nuclear arms.

“Definitely not. I hate this weapon,” President Hashemi Rafsanjani replied when asked in a recent CBS-TV “60 Minutes” interview whether his government wants nuclear weapons.

But the U.S. government and independent analysts say the kinds of nuclear equipment the Iranians have tried to buy for their nuclear energy program clearly suggest plans for weapons development.

It is not surprising that Iran would want to “go nuclear,” some say, in view of the efforts by longtime enemy Iraq to build a bomb.

“If you were Iranian, would you disregard what Iraq has done?” asked Mustafa Kibaroglu, a Turkish specialist in nuclear proliferation.

The U.S. pressure has focused on Russia’s 2-year-old project to build Iran’s first nuclear reactor, at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf coast. After completing plant construction suspended by the Germans in 1979, the Russians will install a 1,000-megawatt reactor they built.

The plant would not contribute directly to weapons development, but U.S. officials worry that training and technology supplied to the civilian side will spill over into a military program. They also are concerned that plutonium embedded in the reactor’s spent fuel could be reprocessed into bomb material--if Iran obtains the necessary technology.