Stolen laptop used to damn Iran

WASHINGTON - American intelligence officials secretly showed documents in a stolen laptop of Iranian nuclear experiments to a number of countries to convince them that Iran was designing a nuclear warhead.

The New York Times says that in mid-July, senior American intelligence officials called the leaders of the International Atomic Energy Agency to the top of a skyscraper overlooking the Danube in the Austrian capital Vienna and unveiled the contents of what they said was a stolen Iranian computer.

The Americans showed data from more than 1000 pages of Iranian computer simulations and accounts of experiments, saying they showed a long effort to design a nuclear warhead, the newspaper reported, quoting European and American participants in the meeting.

The computer contained studies for crucial features of a nuclear warhead, said European and American officials who had examined the material, including a telltale sphere of detonators to trigger an atomic explosion.

The documents specified a blast roughly 600m above a target - considered a prime altitude for a nuclear detonation.

The new evidence suggests Iran has made significant progress in its pursuit of nuclear weapons and that should strengthen the case for increasing international pressure on Tehran to end the programme, United States and European officials say.

The data, which in recent months was shared with both the agency and key countries, is "not definitive [but] it is strongly suggestive that Iran has made significant advancement toward weaponisation", said one US official.

Another US official said that "no one is portraying this as definitive [but] it's one more piece of a strong circumstantial case that they are pursuing a nuclear weapon".

The officials, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue, gave no details of the documents.

Nuclear experts have been saying for months that the fact that US claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities proved largely false is fuelling doubts about intelligence on Iran.

The New York Times said the US officials argued the data was "the strongest evidence yet that, despite Iran's insistence that its nuclear programme is peaceful, the country is trying to develop a compact warhead to fit atop its Shahab missile, which can reach Israel and other countries in the Middle East".

Iran, which kept a uranium enrichment programme secret for 18 years until 2003, is facing referral to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions after failing to convince the international community its nuclear ambitions are entirely peaceful.

The New York Times said Iranian officials denied any knowledge of the warhead plans.

"We are sure that there are no such documents in Iran," the paper quoted Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, as saying in an interview in Tehran.

"I have no idea what they have or what they claim to have. We just hear the claims."

A US official and a European official said that technical experts, including at the agency, who got the briefing were quite concerned at what the data showed.

But the New York Times said that apart from Britain, France and Germany - which have joined Washington in demanding that Iran halt suspicious nuclear activities - other countries remain sceptical.

Shahin Gobadi, a spokesman for an Iranian opposition group which first disclosed Tehran's secret activities in 2002 and has since revealed other details of the nuclear programme, said his group was not the source of the stolen laptop.

But Gobadi said in a telephone interview and an email from Paris that his group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, had also acquired evidence Iran "is working on nuclear warheads".

- REUTERS