VIENNA (Reuters) - The U.N. nuclear watchdog believes Iran could be running 8,000 centrifuges enriching uranium by year end, raising a significant risk it could make atomic bombs, diplomats say, although not everyone agrees.
Despite Iran's strides in shifting from a small nuclear fuel research programme towards an industry in the past few months, it remains unclear whether Tehran could spin so many centrifuges in unison indefinitely, the key to yielding bomb-grade uranium.
Western powers suspect Iran, with the world's second largest oil and gas reserves, is secretly aiming to refine uranium to the high threshold needed for nuclear weapons rather than the low level needed for electricity, as it says.
Iran has surprised monitors familiar with its breakdown-prone research phase, with only a few centrifuges running at once, by launching around 2,000 since February, the majority of them enriching uranium in linked networks.
Tehran is on pace to having 3,000 on line in July, diplomats briefed on International Atomic Energy Agency inspections said -- enough to yield enriched material for one bomb within a year.
Further, IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei has told U.S. and EU leaders trying to foil Iran's atomic ambitions with sanctions that their policy has been "overtaken by events" and that Tehran looked on target for 8,000 centrifuges by December, they said.
But some diplomats and analysts query whether ElBaradei could really divine Iran's nuclear advances -- and indeed might be overstating them to nudge the West into a compromise he thinks is needed to avert U.S.-Iran war -- given the IAEA's declining knowledge about the extent of the programme.
"NO ACCESS"
"For over 16 months now, the IAEA has had no access to the workshops where Iran was making centrifuges or to its stockpile of raw material," said Mark Fitzpatrick, senior nuclear analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
"A year ago, IAEA sources estimated that Iran had enough components for 5,000 centrifuges. But many of them were breaking and other components would not pass quality control," he said.
"If Iran can have 8,000 centrifuges in place by year end, it means Iran has succeeded again in evading export controls."
This week in addressing a meeting of the IAEA's 35-nation board of governors ElBaradei said Iran's progress with enrichment, its failure to answer the Vienna-based IAEA's questions about the nature of its nuclear activity and growing restrictions on inspector access, made Tehran the world's biggest nuclear proliferation concern.
Iran's ultimate goal is 54,000 centrifuges at Natanz.
It has refused to stop enrichment in exchange for trade benefits, despite being slapped with two sets of sanctions banning transfers of nuclear goods and know-how to Tehran, with a broader, more punitive U.N. resolution looming.
ElBaradei angered Western powers last month by saying Iran's programme was too far along to stop entirely and they consider trying to cap it short of "industrial scale" -- many thousands of centrifuges -- poses a serious bomb "breakout" threat.Under such a scenario, Iran would obtain the bulk of its enriched uranium from a "fuel bank" abroad so it would have no reason to undertake large-scale enrichment at home.
A Vienna diplomat said it was possible Iran could now produce all the centrifuges it wanted to operate rather than have to obtain parts via foreign black markets as before.
But, while ElBaradei's estimate was accurate based on what the IAEA knew of Iran's current progress, he added, "it is also incomplete in that the quality of what is being produced seems still to be in question".
"Given that the IAEA has increasingly limited insights into Iran's centrifuge programme," a Western diplomat said, "it's more and more difficult for any expert to make solid predictions on their pace."
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