Israel Matzav

While Obama fiddles, Iran unveils new centrifuges

Iran unveiled a third generation of domestically produced centrifuges on Friday in continued defiance of a leaderless world community.

The new machines are capable of much faster enrichment than those now being used in Iran's nuclear facilities, and Iranian officials praised it as a step toward greater self-sufficiency in the face of international sanctions targeted at choking off the nuclear work.

"Our capable experts at the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran have managed to design a third-generation centrifuge and it has successfully passed all the mechanical tests," said Ali Akbar Salehi, the nuclear chief.

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Iran says it will install more than 50,000 centrifuges at its enrichment facilities in central town of Natanz.

The international community does not have guarantees that sanctions could serve to change Iran’s behavior, but must continue to exert pressure on Teheran in hopes that the Islamic republic might reconsider the pros and cons of pursuing nuclear weapons, US President Barack Obama said in an interview aired Friday morning and communicated by the Reuters news agency.

Speaking to ABC’s Good Morning America, Obama reportedly said the "the history of the Iranian regime, like the North Korean regime, is that … you apply international pressure on these countries; sometimes they choose to change behavior, sometimes they don't."


The US president was quoted as saying that “consistent” international pressure would get through to a regime “which is not a stupid regime, which is very attentive.”

Meanwhile on Friday, North Korea denounced Obama's nuclear policy as "hostile” and vowed to keep building and expanding its arsenal of atomic weapons.

The world's rogue regimes are laughing at Obama. Unfortunately, from where we sit in Israel, it's not very funny. Israel Radio reported tonight that the new centrifuges can enrich at ten times the speed of the old ones.

More on Obama's Good Morning America appearance here.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:54 AM