Iran will begin building a third nuclear enrichment site within a year, the head of Iran's atomic program Ali Akbar Saleh announced Monday. He did not name the location of the planned facility, but said it will be built somewhere that cannot be targeted in an air strike.
Iran has one operational nuclear enrichment plant in the city of Natanz, and a second is being built at a mountain site in Fordo.
Iranian officials say their country's nuclear program is meant to provide energy for civilian use. However, they have refused to grant international inspectors access to nuclear facilities.
In addition, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has threatened to “wipe Israel off the map,” and Iran is openly supportive of terrorist groups that target Israel and Western nationals, including Hamas and Hizbullah. These are moves that add to Western suspicion that Iran's nuclear program is not peaceful in nature.
Ahmadinejad announced last year that his country would build ten new nuclear enrichment plants once appropriate sites were found. According to Saleh, the search for new sites has ended successfully.
In July, Saleh announced that Iran will open a nuclear power plant in September in the city of Bushehr. At the time he downplayed concerns over international sanctions aimed at stopping Iran's unsupervised nuclear program, saying such sanctions could “slow down the job but will not stop activities.”
Both the United States and the European Union voted this summer to impose tougher sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program. The new sanctions seem to be having an effect on the Revolutionary Guards, whose industrial wing has been forced to halt development projects that were heretofore funded by international companies that have now pulled out.