BY blocking the inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iran has brought the world’s attention on to its nuclear ambitions.

The site where the standoff occurred is identified as particularly worrying in a report by the United Nations nuclear watchdog, due to be published on Monday, which has been obtained by The Times.

The report, dated June 6, lists the concerns about Iran’s many-layered nuclear research programme, where inspectors have not been satisfied by its assurance that it wants to build nuclear power stations, not weapons.

Britain and the US fear that even if they establish a democracy in Iraq, next door is a regime which may equip itself with nuclear weapons. Headed by a Shia Islamic theocracy, tugged back and forth by hardliners and moderates, a nuclear Iran could dominate and destabilise the region.

40-year nuclear dream

Iran began its nuclear research in the 1960s, with US help. The Shah, helped by the 1970s oil price boom, was enthusiastic; after the 1979 revolution, the ayatollahs picked up the torch, with Chinese help.

However, the Clinton Administration persuaded China to cut off this help in 1994, in return for US help expanding its own nuclear power (and also out of its own unease about Iranian intentions).

If that had been the end of outside help, the Iranian programme would probably have remained vestigial. Russia has been helping it to develop a large reactor at Bushehr but, under huge international pressure, has done so very slowly.

However, despite US efforts to block foreign help, Iran achieved a crucial leap forward in the mid-1990s, when it acquired the basic centrifuge technology to enrich uranium.

It has yet to perfect this operation. But if it does so, it could take its plentiful deposits of natural uranium, and enrich the material to use in a reactor — or even further, to the grade needed for a bomb. This would free it from having to import enriched uranium, and make it easier to escape supervision.

Gary Samore, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, who was a member of the Clinton team striking the 1994 deal with China, says he firmly believes that Pakistani scientists gave Iran the centrifuge technology, although it might well have been without the sanction of their Government.

What Iran has now

The best-known part of the Iranian programme is the research reactor in Tehran, now running steadily but too small for either power or weapons, and the large reactor under development at Bushehr.

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