The US and its allies plan to demand that Iran provide “unfettered access” to scientists and information regarding an underground uranium enrichment plant suspected of being part of a secret nuclear weapons program, an Obama administration official said on Saturday. A deadline for the access has not yet been determined, but Iran probably would have to comply within weeks, said the official, who was not authorised to speak publicly.

The US is working with five other nations — France, Britain, Russia, China and Germany — to press Iran for details after the disclosure that the Islamic Republic has been building the facility deep in a mountain on a military base near the city of Qom.

President Obama announced the existence of the plant on Friday at an international economic summit in Pittsburgh. US intelligence officials have been tracking the facility since at least 2006 and said the 3,000 centrifuges it is expected to hold could produce enough fuel annually to arm a nuclear warhead.

Meanwhile, Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation chief Ali Akbar Salehi said on Sunday that the country Iran will keep its uranium enrichment level at up to five per cent—much lower than bomb-grade. “We don’t want to change the arrangement of five-percent enrichment merely to produce 150 to 300 kilos of 20-per cent (enriched) fuel,” ILNA news agency quoted him as saying.

On Thursday, officials from the United States, the four other permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany are to meet with Iranian officials in Geneva for previously arranged negotiations that Obama said on Saturday would “take on added urgency.” “This is a serious challenge to the global nonproliferation regime and continues a disturbing pattern of Iranian evasion,” Obama said. “Iran’s leaders must now choose. They can live up to their responsibilities and achieve integration with the community of nations, or they will face increased pressure and isolation, and deny opportunity to their own people.”

... contd.