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By Adrian Blomfield, Middle East Correspondent

 

 

 

Iranian officials and diplomats at the Vienna headquarters of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed that centrifuges at the Fordow enrichment plant near the holy city of Qom had begun production.

 

The announcement represents a significant advance for Iran's nuclear programme and will add to the sense of foreboding in the West.

 

The facility at Qom, which Iran went to great lengths to hide from international inspectors for many years, is buried deep inside a mountain, making it much harder to strike from the air.

 

Iranian engineers began to transfer centrifuges to the Fordow plant from its main enrichment facility at Natanz last August, a move that led in part to renewed speculation at the end of last year that Israel was preparing to launch unilateral military action against Iran.

 

Israeli officials yesterday declined to be drawn into a response, but one said: "It is another reminder that time is running out to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power".

 

 

Although the idea of unilateral military action has deeply divided the Israeli establishment, the development will undoubtedly raise fears that the prospect is drawing closer.

 

According to sources close to Israeli intelligence, defence chiefs have developed a doctrine, known as the "framework of immunity", which concludes that there is a point in the development of Iran's nuclear project after which military action would no longer be considered effective.

 

A former Israeli intelligence official suggested that the beginning of uranium enrichment at Fordow brought Iran's "framework of immunity" closer.

 

Iran continues to insist that its atomic programme is peaceful and that it has no intention of building a nuclear bomb. Officials in Tehran maintained that the IAEA was being given full access to all of the country's enrichment facilities.

 

"All nuclear activities, including enrichment in Natanz and Fordow are under continuous surveillance and controls and safeguards of the IAEA," Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran's envoy to the agency, was quoted as saying.

 

While the IAEA does monitor both facilities, the new plant will allow Iran to triple its stockpiles of uranium enriched to 20 per cent purity, bringing it closer to being able to produce weapons grade material.

 

The IAEA has also concluded that Iran is developing a military dimension to its nuclear facility in secret, and has condemned the country for defying UN Security Council demands that it suspend all uranium enrichment. The fact that Iran divulged the existence of Fordow in 2009, and then only because the facility had been discovered by western intelligence agencies, has heightened suspicions.

 

Tensions with Iran have grown more acute in recent weeks after the United States and the European Union began to impose stiffer sanctions against the regime, which responded with a threat to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, a strategic waterway in the Persian Gulf through which a third of the world's tanker-borne oil is carried.

 

In a defiant message to his people, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, vowed that the sanctions would fail to deter his country from achieving its destiny.

 

"Western officials have declared on a number of occasions that, with sanctions and pressure, they want to discourage the people and lead officials to renounce their plans, but they are mistaken and they will not achieve their objectives," he said. Telegraph