Azerbaijan, Baku, Feb. 12 / Trend E. Tariverdiyeva /
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's statements that Iran has enriched uranium to 20 percent are a political bluff. They are unlikely to correspond to reality, experts said.
Iranian president's statement on nuclear program is pure politics and had nothing to do with a nuclear program on a technical level. This also deals with the statements on completion of 20-percent enrichment of the first consignment of the uranium, said a European expert on Iranian politics Rouzbeh Parsi.
Iran has already enriched the first batch of uranium up to 20-percent, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said at the rally in Tehran to commemorate the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution Feb.11, IRINN television channel reported.
According to the presidential decree, the enrichment of uranium from the current 5 percent to 20 percent of the plant at Natanz was to begin on Tuesday, February 9.
According to experts, Ahmadinejad's statement is pure politics. It is not technically related to the nuclear program.
"Regarding the nuclear technology, there is very seldom you can do that can be started on one day and ended within the couple of days, Parsi told Trend in a telephone conversation. It is a very neat kind of technology. It requires time to get it right."
For the moment, the biggest problem for Ahmadinejad is the demonstrations. For the last couple of days, he has come out with a number of statements on nuclear issue, of course, because he knows that this will bring him the biggest repercussion outside the country, said Parsi.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's statements do not reflect the real capabilities of Iran at present, U.S. expert on Iran Mark N. Katz reported.
"I think that Ahmadinejad's claim that Iran will enrich its own medical grade uranium was made to elicit concessions from the P5+1, and does not reflect Iran's actual capacity at present," Politics Professor at the Public and International Affairs Department at George Mason University Mark Katz wrote Trend in an e-mail.
According to observers, Iran simply does not have the capacity for this kind of enrichment of nuclear fuel technically.
The professor at the University of Glasgow, nuclear expert Reza Taghizadeh told Trend that even if really within three days, Iran enriched 20-percent uranium in small volumes, the enriched uranium is in a gaseous form and with the help of special technology should be turned into solid fuel for use in a nuclear reactor. He said that there is not such technology in Iran.
According to Taghizadeh, Iran can enrich to 20 percent only the uranium gas, in addition, the uranium enriched in Iran is mixed and impure. "20 percent uranium enriched in Iran should first be cleaned, and then turned into a flat uranium fuel or fuel in the form of the tube. There is no technology in Iran for these two processes," said Taghizadeh.
Katz said , the Washington Post published an article about how Iran is experiencing great difficulty in enriching uranium even to the low (3.5 percent) commercial grade, and casting doubt on its ability to enrich to medical (20 percent) grade, much less high (90 percent) weapons grade.
Certainly, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's statement that Iran has enriched uranium to 20 percent can be taken as a bluff. But the scenario of development of events in which Iran gradually completes several nuclear bombs is possible, Russia's expert on Iran Yevgeny Satanovsky said.
"According to indirect data, now Iran gradually completes up to three copies of warheads on missiles. The last technical issues are solved," President of Russia's Middle East Institute Yevgeny Satanovsky told Trend over phone from Moscow.
According to Satanovsky, most likely that Ahmadinejad was playing games with "Six" and the world community all the time, who yielded to his tricks with readiness.
According to Satanovsky, the fact that experts did not admit the technical level of Iran as sufficient to create nuclear weapons can be explained. "They have been engaged by their agencies and do not want to become alarmists. However, in reality, Iran is quite capable of producing nuclear weapons right now," he said.
Iran, producing modern equipment, including turbine blades for jet aircraft, and having received technologies from Pakistan through Abdul Qadeer Khan, under the patronage of the government of Benazir Bhutto, is more ready to produce nuclear weapons, than, for example, Libya or North Korea, which have almost completed their nuclear programs, experts said.
E. Ostapenko, D. Khatinoglu contributed to this article.