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Russia Delivers Nuclear Fuel To Iran

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By HELENE COOPER, The New York Times

Published: December 18, 2007

WASHINGTON - The United States lost a long battle Monday when Russia delivered nuclear fuel to an Iranian power plant that is at the center of an international dispute over its nuclear program. Iran confirmed plans build a second such plant.

In announcing that it had delivered the first fuel shipment to the power plant, at Bushehr in southern Iran, Russian officials said that while it was in Iran, the fuel would be under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear monitoring agency for the United Nations.

Russia also said that the Iranian government had guaranteed that the fuel would be used only for the power plant.

The Bush administration took pains not to criticize the Russian move publicly, even expressing support for outside supplies if that led Iran to suspend its nuclear enrichment program.

"If the Russians are willing to do that, which I support, then the Iranians do not need to learn how to enrich," President Bush said.

"If the Iranians accept that uranium for a civilian nuclear power plant, then there's no need for them to learn how to enrich," Bush said.

But from the U.S. standpoint, the timing could not have been worse, coming just two weeks after the release of a U.S. intelligence estimate that concluded that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

The National Intelligence Estimate also concluded that Iran had not restarted its nuclear weapons program as of mid-2007, undercutting a central tenet of the Bush administration's basis for maintaining international pressure against Iran.

While administration officials maintain that the intelligence estimate does not mean that the United States and its allies should ease the pressure, the practical consequence of the report has been to embolden Iran.

It has also made it more likely that China and Russia, countries with perhaps the smallest appetite for Iran sanctions, will not agree to a new round of sanctions by the U.N. Security Council.

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