Iran's Green-Salt Blues

By Elaine Shannon

Green salt isn't something you'd want to sprinkle on French fries. It's what nuclear chemists call uranium tetrafluoride, a grainy substance that can be used to make fuel for a nuclear reactor or fissile material for a bomb. In short, it's scary stuff, which is why the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confronted Iran late last month about a secret Iranian research effort called the Green Salt Project. Iran has long maintained that it wants to enrich uranium to generate nuclear power, not to make a bomb. But disclosure of the project--and its apparent links to the testing of high explosives--seems to have been just what Washington and its allies needed to send Iran to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions, a measure the IAEA's board of 35 member nations approved last week in a 27-to-3 vote, with five abstentions.

What happens next? A formal IAEA report on Iran's nuclear program, due March 6, is expected to conclude that the agency can no longer vouch for Iran's activities. That would pressure the Security Council to take meaningful steps when it addresses the matter next month. Tehran now has a few weeks to disclose all aspects of its nuclear program, but it has already denied IAEA requests to review documents and interview sources, and said after Saturday's vote that it would further curtail the nuclear watchdog's inspection powers.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice helped firm up support for the IAEA vote by having aides brief foreign officials on a trove of documents that, according to U.S. diplomatic sources, expose a clandestine Iranian military nuclear-research operation. The documents, found in 2004 on a laptop computer, which U.S. intelligence believes came from an Iranian engineer, contain data on tests for high explosives, a design for a missile re-entry vehicle and a diagram of a green-salt production line. Separately, those areas of research could imply fairly benign intentions. But if an Iranian military agency has been coordinating all the research, the U.S. assessment is "you're talking about a nuclear-tipped missile," says a senior official with access to the intelligence reports.

Even Russia and China, with economic ties to Tehran, now seem convinced that it may all add up to a nuclear-weapons program. Rice won those countries' support at a dinner in London last week, hosted by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. "She made the argument," says U.S. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, "that we all have an interest in not introducing another nuclear power into the Mideast."

With reporting by Andrew Purvis