Nuke Tests In Iran?

IAEA Finds Materials Likely Required For Future Nuclear Experiments

(CBS/AP)  Experiments with high explosives, possibly linked to future nuclear weapons tests, were carried out as recently as 2003 in Iran, sources tell CBS News.

International Atomic Energy Agency analysts said they suspect the experiments took place at a huge military complex south of Tehran. Inspectors were permitted only one visit, and saw only part of the site, reports CBS News correspondent Sheila MacVicar.

Despite the lack of access, Sean McCormack, a U.S. State Department spokesman, said, "we are seeing more and more indications" that Iran's enrichment activities have the intended purpose of building a nuclear weapon.

Meanwhile, Iran ratcheted up its confrontation with the West on Wednesday, with its president lashing out at the United States and Europe as "bully countries" a day before a key meeting that could put Iran before the U.N. Security Council.

Tehran's top nuclear negotiator said Iran would resume large-scale uranium enrichment in response, warning that its main enrichment plant at Natanz was ready for full operation.

Iran provoked an outcry on Jan. 10 when it broke U.N. seals at the facility to begin research-level enrichment, a process that can produce material for nuclear reactors or, if sufficiently processed, atomic weapons.

"Natanz is ready for work. We only need to notify the IAEA that we are resuming (large-scale) enrichment. When we do that is our call. If they (report Iran to the Security Council), we will do it quickly," negotiator Ali Larijani said.

Earlier Wednesday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad derided the United States as a "hollow superpower" and vowed to pursue the Iran's nuclear program no matter what.

"Nuclear energy is our right, and we will resist until this right is fully realized," Ahmadinejad told a crowd of thousands in the southern Iran city of Bushehr, where Russia is finishing the construction of Iran's first nuclear power plant.

"Our nation can't give in to the coercion of some bully countries who imagine they are the whole world," he added.

The crowd responded with chants of "Nuclear energy is our right," CBS radio correspondent Angus McDowell reports.

In an interview with the AP on Wednesday, Mr. Bush repeated his opposition to an Iranian nuclear capability.

"We cannot afford to have Iran with a nuclear weapon," the president said. "We want them to have nuclear power but under the conditions that we describe."

The IAEA, the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog group, said it has found "administrative interconnections" between uranium enrichment, the high explosives tests and the design of a missile warhead, all of which could have a "military-nuclear dimension," MacVicar reports.

Mr. Bush held out little hope of avoiding a showdown with Tehran. "It looks like to me the process is headed toward the (U.N.) Security Council, and that if the Iranians would like to avoid that, they ought to work in good faith to get rid of their nuclear weapon ambitions," the president said.