Iran might move nuclear facilities

A senior commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) said Wednesday that Iran will probably move its uranium enrichment sites, the semi-official Mehr news agency reported. "If conditions make it necessary, we will move (Iran's) uranium enrichment sites to safer places," Brigadier General Gholamreza Jalali told Mehr. Iran is reported to have carried out preparations to shift higher-grade enrichment to an underground facility near the holy city of Qom, offering the sensitive work better protection against any military attacks. "We have achieved a kind of immunisation of (nuclear) infrastructures and cyber systems as well as separating risk centers," Jalali, chief of Iran's Passive Defence Organisation, was quoted as saying. Commenting on the impossibility of the attacks on Iran's nuclear establishments, Jalali said: "If the US and Israel had been able to hit our nuclear facilities, surely they could have done it by now," said the report. He added that Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant could be safe thanks to the global conventions and regulations which prevent any attack on nuclear power plants. Further, the attack on Bushehr nuclear power plant will endanger the safety of the Persian Gulf littoral states, he said. The West believes that Iran's nuclear programme aims at producing nuclear weapons, while Tehran insists that the programme is for " civilian" purposes.   Israel, widely believed to have the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East, says a nuclear-armed Iran would threaten its existence. A November report by the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, suggested that Iran pursued the science needed to make an atomic bomb at least until 2003 and that secret research may be continuing. The US and Israel have not ruled out the possibility of hitting nuclear targets in the Islamic Republic. Iran started refining uranium last year to 20 per cent purity, a level which takes it closer to the 90 per cent level needed for bombs. Iran says the material will fuel a medical research reactor. Adding to Western concern about its aims, Iran said in June it would move this higher-grade enrichment to the Fordow facility - tucked inside a mountain on a former military base - from its main enrichment plant near the central city of Natanz. Last month's IAEA report said Iran had installed centrifuge machines to enrich uranium at Fordow and that nuclear material had been moved there, indications that enrichment may soon get under way at the site. Iran says its response to any military action will be "painful." "If the Americans and Israelis could attack our nuclear facilities and inflict a blow on it, they would have surely done it," said Jalali. A hardline lawmaker, Parviz Sarvari, said on Monday that OPEC member Iran planned to carry out military maneuvers near the Strait of Hormuz in the Gulf, where about 30 percent of the world's crude oil exports pass through. But Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman dismissed the lawmaker's remarks, saying it was Sarvari's personal view and did not represent Iran's official view. However, Iranian officials have warned in the past about the closure of the strategically important Strait as a possible retaliatory measure if the nuclear facilities were attacked. Concerns about Iran's disputed nuclear work and threats to major shipping lanes drove up oil prices by more than $2 a barrel on Tuesday to post its biggest gain since late November, in sharp contrast to a fall in most other financial markets. Brent crude slipped towards $109 on Wednesday.