U.N. says Iran speeding nuclear program

VIENNA, Austria — Iran has accelerated its program to enrich uranium and defied a U.N. Security Council deadline to suspend nuclear activities before Tehran is capable of producing fuel for nuclear weapons, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said here Thursday.

The report by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, confirmed that Iran recently began installing the first of 3,000 gas centrifuges in a heavily fortified underground chamber at Natanz and that it plans to "bring them gradually into operation by May."

A facility that large, if it functions properly, could produce enough highly enriched uranium in a year to build a nuclear warhead. A senior U.N. diplomat here cautioned that the Iranian schedule is "fairly optimistic" and said that the highly sensitive centrifuge cascades may not be operational before the fall.

The six-page report is almost certain to trigger moves by the Bush administration and its European allies for stiffer U.N. sanctions against the hard-line Iranian regime. The escalating crisis now moves to London, where major powers will meet Monday to consider a range of actions against Iran.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in Berlin, said the United States was determined to "use all available channels and the Security Council" to draft a new resolution aimed at halting Tehran's nuclear activity.

The report "shows that Iran has not changed its behavior, has not changed its views, and is continuing on the path of defiance," State Department spokesman Tom Casey said in Washington.

But Russia's U.N. ambassador, Vitaly Churkin, told reporters that sanctions are not a solution. "We should not lose sight of the goal, and the goal is not to have a resolution or to impose sanctions. The goal is to accomplish a political outcome of this problem."