Report expected to assail Iran's nuclear program

WASHINGTON — A U.N. watchdog agency's report to be issued today will declare that, despite a formal request from the Security Council, Iran has not provided international inspectors with any new information about the country's nuclear program and has accelerated, rather than curbed, uranium-enrichment activities, sources said.

Iran announced two weeks ago that it had used a "cascade" — or array — of 164 centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency are expected to confirm in the report that Iran ran the cascade successfully, but several officials with knowledge of the nuclear program said Thursday that the cascade was no longer operating.

It remains unclear whether Iran managed to enrich a small quantity of uranium to a level of 3.5 percent, as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced April 11. That level would suffice for nuclear energy but is far too low for a weapons program, which the Bush administration contends Iran is clandestinely developing.

The IAEA will include these findings, sources said, in what they characterized as a brief and highly negative report to be delivered today, the end of a 30-day deadline the Security Council set for Iran to stop enriching uranium until inspectors are confident the program is exclusively peaceful.

The Bush administration is hoping that the report, and Iran's actions, will make it easier for council members to increase pressure on Iran. The council's March request, along with others by the IAEA's board of directors, asked Iran to voluntarily suspend its enrichment program.