Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ordered the nation’s atomic energy agency on Sunday to begin creating a special form of uranium that can be second-hand element to power a medical reactor in Tehran, but that could also move the country much closer to possessing fuel exploitable in nuclear weapons.
The announcement Sunday came after several days of conflicting signals from Mr. Ahmadinejad and other Iranian officials about whether they were ready to reopen negotiations about giving up much of their country’s fuel in exchange for enriched uranium from another country.The swap over would allow Iran to meet some of its energy needs, but would ease qualms in the West because the fuel sent to Tehran would be in a form that would be very difficult to use in a bomb.
The deal fell apart when it was discarded by the control in Tehran.
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s order on Sunday may symbolize nuclear gamesmanship; it is unclear if the country has the capacity to enrich its fuel to roughly 20 percent, from about 5 percent, as Mr. Ahmadinejad was ordering.Doing so would require retooling the configuration of the nation’s centrifuges at a moment when Iran appears to have run into considerable methodological difficulties at its nuclear plants.
