New evidence against Iran?

TIME: Bush’s diplomatic gambit has helped build consensus on how to deal with Iran, but new findings of uranium enrichment at a military site may really increase the pressure. TIME

Bush’s diplomatic gambit has helped build consensus on how to deal with Iran, but new findings of uranium enrichment at a military site may really increase the pressure

By ELAINE SHANNON

Posted: 3 June 2006

Chalk up a diplomatic win for the White House. President Bush’s surprise offer last week to talk to Tehran yielded breakthroughs that have momentarily quelled fears of U.S. military action against the Iranian regime. During a marathon meeting in Vienna with diplomats from the other four permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, as well as Germany and the E.U., Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice obtained an unprecedented commitment from Moscow and Bejing to support penalties in the Council if Iran refuses a package of political and economic incentives and continues nuclear activities that could enable it to build a bomb.

European envoys hope to elicit the regime’s answer before July’s G-8 summit in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Vienna group agreed that if Iran fails to accede to the world’s demands, the matter will return to the Security Council, which would enact unspecified punitive measures.

The unity could crumble if the Vienna group differs on whether Tehran is cooperating. But for now the pressure on Iran from all sides is growing. An International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran’s activities is expected next week, and Western diplomats tell Time that it will include “potentially incriminating” details about traces of highly enriched uranium found by inspectors recently on equipment at the Lavisan-Shian military site. The find is significant not because of the residue–it isn’t bomb-grade and may have been on the equipment when it was bought from renegade Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan–but because Iran hasn’t explained why such enrichment tools were found at a military facility. Iranian officials still insist their military is not engaged in nuclear work.

— With reporting by Andrew Purvis From the Jun. 12, 2006 issue of TIME magazine