VIENNA – Iranian construction of a previously secret uranium enrichment site is at an advanced stage, with high-tech equipment already in place at the fortified facility ahead of its 2011 startup, the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a report Monday.
The revelation of the existence of the underground plant known as Fordo, near the holy city of Qom, has heightened concerns of other possible undeclared Iranian facilities that are not subject to IAEA oversight and therefore could be used for military purposes.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said the IAEA report "underscores that Iran still refuses to comply fully with its international nuclear obligations."
The IAEA report offered no estimate of Fordo's capabilities, but a senior international official familiar with the U.N. agency's work in Iran said it appeared designed to produce about a ton of enriched uranium a year.
The official, as well as analysts, said that would be enough for a nuclear warhead but too little for Iran's civilian reactors that have yet to come online, including the still unfinished plant at the southern port of Bushehr. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the information he was citing was confidential.
"It won't (even) be able to produce a reactor's worth of fuel every 90 years, but it will be able to produce one bomb a year," said Ivan Oelrich, vice president of the Strategic Security Program of the Federation of American Scientists. "It does look strange."
The IAEA also said production at Iran's main enrichment site at Natanz — revealed by dissidents in 2002 and under IAEA monitoring — was stagnating at mid-2009 levels.
The report did not offer a reason. But the official suggested that experts who used to work at Natanz could be preoccupied with finishing the Fordo site.
As early as three years ago, Iran had said immediate plans for Natanz were to install about 8,000 enriching centrifuges, and Monday's report suggested Tehran had reached that goal.
The IAEA summary said that as of Nov. 2, about 8,600 centrifuges had been set up, but only about 4,000 were enriching — or 600 fewer than in September. Still, the official said output had been steady since June with about 220 pounds (100 kilograms) of enriched uranium being produced a month.
The report said Natanz had churned out nearly 4,000 pounds (1,800 kilograms) of uranium by Nov. 2 — close to what experts consider to be needed for two nuclear weapons. But for use as warhead material it would have to enriched further — it is now low-enriched uranium suitable only for fueling nuclear plants.
Iran insists it only wants to enrich uranium to make fuel to power nuclear reactors for civilian purposes, but fears that it could at some point use the technology to make weapons has resulted in three sets of U.N. Security Council sanctions meant to pressure Tehran into freezing the activity.
The restricted document, which was obtained by The Associated Press, also noted that "for well over a year," Iran had stonewalled IAEA efforts to investigate allegations it actively worked on a nuclear weapons program.
Unless Tehran has a change of heart, the IAEA "will not be in a position to provide credible assurances about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities."
The report's main focus was Fordo, a highly fortified underground space. Iran told the IAEA only in September that it was building the facility, leading U.S., British and French leaders to denounce Tehran for keeping it secret. IAEA inspectors visited the plant last month and the report noted "an advanced stage of construction," with support equipment, piping and electrical wiring for centrifuges already in place.
The report said the revelation of Fordo's existence "gives rise to questions about whether there were any other nuclear facilities in Iran which had not been declared" to IAEA.
The senior official said that as of Monday, Iran had failed to respond to a Nov. 6 IAEA letter asking for assurance Iran was not actively planning to build any other nuclear facilities.
But Iran says it fulfilled its legal obligations when it revealed the plant's construction, although IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has said Tehran was "outside the law" and should have informed his agency when Iran decided to build it.

Nations suspicious of Iran believe it decided to tell the IAEA only after Tehran became convinced the plant's existence had been noted by foreign intelligence services and was about to be revealed by Western leaders.

A senior Western official recently told the AP that Fordo appeared too small to house a civilian nuclear program but large enough for military activities.

Monday's report — prepared for next week's meeting of the IAEA's 35-nation board — did not address the issue of size or function beyond saying the Fordo facility would house about 3,000 centrifuges, which the senior international official said could turn out about just over a ton of enriched uranium annually.

The report cited Iranian officials as suggesting Fordo was built covertly "as a result of the augmentation of threats of military attacks against Iran" — an allusion to past U.S. and Israeli suggestions that force could not be ruled out as a possible last resort to stop Tehran's nuclear defiance.

Reports Monday from Moscow cast more doubt on Iran's case that it needed to build up its nuclear fuel enrichment capacity through facilities such as Fordo and Natanz.

Officials in Russia and Iran had previously announced plans to turn on the Bushehr reactor, giving Iran its first operating nuclear power plant decades after construction began. But Russian Energy Minister Sergei Shmatko told Russian media that "the launch itself will not happen" in that time frame.

Shmatko blamed the delay on technical issues, the reports said. But Moscow has in the past has appeared to use the project to press Tehran to cooperate with international demands to freeze enrichment.

On Sunday, President Barack Obama pushed for continued pressure on Iran. In talks with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in Singapore, Obama said "time is running out" for Iran to sign on to a deal with the IAEA.

Since September, Medvedev has suggested Russia could support further sanctions against Iran if it did not open its nuclear program to inspections to prove it was not trying to build a bomb. He spoke in similar terms Sunday, avoiding the word sanctions but saying "other options remain on the table" if Iran does not meet its obligations.

Shmatko said construction is proceeding as planned at Bushehr and that Russia "is certain that it will fulfill its commitments to Iran," according to RIA Novosti.

But his remarks raised hackles in Iran, already angry over Russian foot-dragging on fulfilling a 2007 contract to provide S-300 surface-to-air missiles to Tehran — also seen as a Russian lever in relations with Iran.

The semiofficial Mehr news agency quoted Alaeddin Boroujerdi, a parliamentary committee chairman, as saying "this hasty expression by (the) Russian energy minister does not look normal."

International frustration with Iran has intensified after Tehran first appeared to accept a plan meant to delay its ability to make a nuclear weapon, then backtracked.

Obama said Iran is running out of time to agree the plan to ship most of its low-enriched enriched uranium abroad to enrich it to a higher level. Diplomats told the AP that senior officials from the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany, which are seeking to persuade Iran to accept an enrichment freeze, planned to meet this week to discuss a possible fourth round of U.N. Security Council Sanctions.

The West had hoped the plan on exporting Iran's enriched material would dramatically reduce its stockpile and delay its capacity to build nuclear weapons.

Iran is enriching uranium to less than 5 percent, enough to produce fuel but not for making arms. Enriching uranium to much higher levels can produce weapons-grade material.

Under a U.N. plan, after further enrichment in Russia, France would convert the uranium into fuel rods to be returned to Iran for use in a reactor that produces medical isotopes. Fuel rods cannot be readily turned into weapons-grade material.

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Associated Press writers Steve Gutterman in Moscow, Nasser Karimi in Tehran and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed to this report.

It is risky business to view today's key "off-year" contests -- in Virginia, New Jersey and New York -- as bellwethers for next year's much fuller slate of elections. Or, at least that's what history suggests.

Sometimes, these odd-year elections can look oddly predictive, as in 2003, when Republican pickups for governor in Mississippi and Kentucky preceded the re-election of Republican George W. Bush as president in 2004, and in 2005, when the Democratic candidates scored hard-won holds for governor in New Jersey and Virginia on the eve of their party's takeover of Congress in the 2006 elections.

But the big off-year races in 2007 ended up a wash, with a Republican takeover for governor of Louisiana, a Democratic take-back in Kentucky and a GOP hold in Mississippi. And the next year, the Democrats nonetheless celebrated Barack Obama's victory for president and big seat gains in Congress, governors' offices and state legislative races.

That said, it will come as no surprise tonight when both parties deploy their best spin, making their arguments that the most-watched races -- the contests for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, and the raucous House special election in upstate New York's 23rd Congressional District -- are harbingers of things to come next year when there are 37 Senate seats (including January's special election in Massachusetts), 38 gubernatorial seats and 435 House seats up for election.

After the huge setbacks their party endured in the 2006 and 2008 elections, Republican strategists welcome any sign that the tides are turning back in their favor. So a sweep of today's three big races, or winning at least two out of three, is important for a party looking for bragging rights.

But this year's big contests seem a bit too idiosyncratic to provide a single takeaway message.

If polls are correct, the clearest Republican victory is likely to come in Virginia, where a strong Democratic trend over the course of the decade appears to be on the verge of at least temporary interruption. GOP nominee Bob McDonnell, a former state attorney general, has busted out to a big lead in what earlier was seen as a tossup race with Democrat Creigh Deeds, a state senator.

But McDonnell, who established his political career as a socially conservative state legislator, has played down that aspect of his persona as he has campaigned for votes in the recently Democratic-leaning Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., instead emphasizing and lucidly explaining his positions on the state's economy, taxes, transportation funding and other kitchen-table issues for most Virginia voters. He has run a much better campaign than Deeds, who comes from a lightly populated area in the western part of the state and has had trouble countering McDonnell's ties to Northern Virginia, where he grew up, and the populous Hampton Roads area to the southeast, where he lives and has his political base.

The New Jersey governor's race is much more a referendum on incumbent Jon Corzine -- who has never been overwhelmingly popular and has suffered of late from terrible job approval ratings -- than on Obama, who carried the state by 15 points in last year's presidential race and whose continued popularity in the state is Corzine's biggest hope for survival. Republicans initially touted former U.S. Attorney Chris Christie as a great recruit, but his own campaign stumbles and the lavishly self-financed campaign run by former Wall Street CEO Corzine have turned the race into a tossup. The outcome is likely to be determined by how much of the vote strays to independent candidate Chris Daggett, a former state and federal environmental policy official, and which of the major-party contenders he hurts more.

And these two statewide races have, in the campaign's final weeks, been unexpectedly overshadowed by the New York's House special election, which has drawn unusually attention as it emerged as a major skirmish in the "battle for the soul" of the Republican Party -- between centrists and other party pragmatists who believe the Republicans must recruit more moderate candidates to win in strongly Democratic-trending areas such as the Northeast, and conservatives who say the GOP needs to field candidates who will stick to the national party's right-ward platform and fight to persuade voters that is the right direction for the nation.

Through most of the campaign, the national Republican organization played the pragmatic role, backing state Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, a moderate, in her bid for the seat vacated by nine-term Republican John M. McHugh to become secretary of the Army. But conservative activists rebelled, citing Scozzafava's support for abortion rights and same-sex marriage and her ties to labor unions, and aligned with accountant Doug Hoffman, the nominee of New York's Conservative Party. Hoffman then drew the support of some big-name national conservative figures, including 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin.

The schism became big national news this weekend when Scozzafava, her poll numbers plummeting, dropped out of the race -- and urged her backers to vote for Democratic nominee Bill Owens, a lawyer. But the Republican National Committee and its campaign arm, the National Republican Congressional Committee, which had invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in local advertising supporting Scozzafava's campaign, turned on a dime and switched its endorsement to Hoffman.

Strategy, Risk and End Games

But even if the GOP gets the better of these 2009 races, any claims of major momentum heading into 2010 would require a rebuttal of a wide range of national opinion polls, the results of which suggest that the Republican Party has a long way to go in order to regain the public standing it lost during Bush's tumultuous second term.

This summer, the GOP faithful had reason to hope that the November elections would send a clear message that the public had already lost faith in President Obama and the hefty Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress. After entering office in January with soaring approval ratings, Obama saw his popularity decline as his campaign promise of "Change" met the gritty realities of the policy-making process and the nearly unanimous opposition of a determined Republican congressional minority.

Individual and organized critics held highly publicized anti-tax "tea party" rallies and besieged lawmakers' town hall meetings to lambaste the $787 billion legislation (PL 111-5) that Obama pushed through Congress in February in the name of stimulating the recession-plagued economy; the federal government's intervention in the teetering financial and auto industries; the Democrats' sweeping proposals to overhaul the nation's health care system; and an energy bill pushed by Democrats, aimed at limiting climate change, that includes a "cap and trade" program for industrial emissions that most Republicans protest as potentially crippling to the U.S. economy.

With loud voices accusing Obama of putting the United States on a path toward socialism, the president's approval ratings dropped. Until, that is they stopped falling. And where the parties stand on Election Day 2009, in the big-picture numbers, looks rather amazingly similar to where they were on Election Day 2008.

By the end of the summer, Obama's approval ratings hit a plateau, with percentages in the low to mid 50s. That puts the president's support base just about where it was in November 2008, when he won the presidency by 53 percent to 46 percent over Republican John McCain, an Arizona senator.

Of the October surveys co-sponsored by the major television networks' news divisions, an ABC News-Washington Post poll conducted Oct. 15-18 showed 57 percent of respondents approved and 40 percent disapproved of Obama's performance in office (exactly the same number as in the organization's Aug. 13-17 poll). A CBS News poll taken Oct. 5-8 showed approval exceeding disapproval by 56 percent to 34 percent (the same positive and 1 point lower negative compared to an Aug. 27-31 survey).

An NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll taken Oct. 22-25 was less generous, putting the numbers at 51 percent approval and 42 percent disapproval. But that 9-point margin is the same as in the same polling unit's Aug. 15-17 numbers.

That is not to say that many voters don't have issues with Obama on policy issues. That Oct. 22-25 NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll found 47 percent approved and 46 percent disapproved of Obama's handling of the economy. On the hot-button issue of health care, 43 percent approved and 48 percent disapproved. He did better, but not spectacular, on his handling of foreign policy, with 51 percent approving and 39 percent disapproving.

And there was a potentially worrisome number in aggregate polling done so far this year by Gallup which showed the number of self-described conservatives at 40 percent of respondents, up from 37 percent in 2008, to 36 percent who described themselves as moderate and 20 percent who called themselves liberal.

But the Republicans' potential for growth in the 2010 elections may be held back by the fact that their party's "brand," which incurred major damage from the Bush years, is still held in very low regard by most voters.

The NBC News-Wall Street Journal pollsters asked respondents' feelings about the Republican Party. Just 25 percent gave a positive response (and just 6 percent were very positive) while 46 percent were negative and 27 percent were neutral. The positive number was actually down from 32 percent in a poll taken Oct. 17-20, 2008, with about two weeks left in that year's presidential and congressional campaigns.

The Democrats' October 2009 numbers -- 42 percent positive, 36 percent negative and 20 percent neutral -- don't exactly rock the house, but they remain considerably better than the Republicans'.

A similar question asked by CNN/Opinion Research in an Oct. 16-18 poll found 36 percent had a favorable opinion of the Republican Party to 54 percent unfavorable. The Democrats' numbers were 53 percent favorable to 41 percent unfavorable.

These polling numbers, taken collectively, suggest that both parties are engaged in high-risk political strategies as they move beyond Election Day 2009 and into the bigger arena of 2010. Obama has taken on a full plate of the nation's most contentious issues during his first year in office, greatly expanded federal spending (and debt) to address the recession and seeking major changes in the nation's energy and environmental policies, all while dealing with the nation's stressful military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan that he inherited from predecessor. So if most voters see him as falling short when the 2010 elections roll around, his Democratic Party could suffer a serious reversal.

But the Republicans are taking a big gamble, too, in taking a confrontational approach in trying to block or slow virtually every element of the president's domestic agenda. If the economy reaches a recovery phase by the fall of 2010, and especially if there is evidence of jobs growth, Democrats will freely remind voters that Republicans were quick to condemn Obama's stimulus plan as an expensive failure -- and their efforts to label the GOP as the "Party of No" will gain credence among many voters.

And while Republican leaders are fond of telling Democrats that they now own all the big issues and that they need to get over blaming Bush, it would take a horrendous political collapse by Obama to make that anything but wishful thinking. Democrats for 40 years were able to make political hay out of the name of Republican Herbert Hoover, who was president when the Great Depression hit. And there are still some Republicans who are fond of reminding voters of the unpopular presidency of Democrat Jimmy Carter, nearly 30 years after he lost his 1980 bid for re-election.

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama greeted Hamid Karzai's election victory with as much admonishment as praise on Monday, pointedly advising America's partner in war he must make more serious efforts to end corruption in Afghanistan's government and prepare his nation to ultimately defend itself.
"I emphasized that this has to be a point in time in which we begin to write a new chapter," Obama said in describing his phone call to the Afghan president. When Karzai offered back assurances, Obama said he told him that "the proof is not going to be in words. It's going to be in deeds."
Obama's message of stern solidarity came as he considers sending tens of thousands more U.S. troops into the war zone in Karzai's country.
Karzai won a second term Monday when competitor Abdullah Abdullah pulled out of the Nov. 7 runoff, suggesting it would be doomed by fraud just as the first voting in August was. The handling of the first election cost Karzai in international credibility.
Yet the White House put its weight behind the legitimacy of the final outcome after helping to broker a runoff that never happened. Obama called the process "messy" but said Karzai won in accordance with Afghan law. The White House repeatedly said Abdullah had pulled out for his own political and personal reasons.
The collapse of the planned run-off increases pressure on the Obama administration to quickly end its lengthy deliberations about whether to commit more U.S. forces to a worsening war. Obama may announce his revamped war strategy, including a decision on sending more troops, early next week before a planned overseas trip.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs acknowledged that Karzai's win by default is a factor in the coming decision about troops but did not say the timetable for an announcement has changed. The administration continues to say it will happen in the "coming weeks."
In recounting his call to Karzai, Obama spent most of his time saying what he expects from his fellow president: more diligent efforts to end corruption, cooperation in accelerating the training of Afghan security forces, tangible benefits in the lives of the Afghan people.
Those aren't just Obama's standards. He is under pressure to show Congress and the public that the U.S. is dealing with a trustworthy partner, particularly if it is going to send more troops there. Many Americans have grown weary of the war and are questioning its worth.
About 68,000 U.S. troops are already in Afghanistan, where October was the deadliest month for U.S. forces. Several thousands NATO troops from various countries are also committed to a war that has stretched into its ninth year and is focused on combatting insurgents and dismantling al-Qaida terrorists.
Obama said Karzai needs to "take advantage of the international community's interest in his country."
Indeed, the White House made clear that the election gave Karzai legal legitimacy but not necessarily any new boost of credibility.
"Nobody has ever made the accusation that credibility was going to be had simply out of one election," Gibbs said.
Relieved U.S. officials said the outcome accomplished two main objectives that have been part of weeks of strategy discussion in Washington: The results yielded finality to a messy process and came only after Karzai acknowledged the illegitimacy of the original balloting.
Knowledge that Karzai would continue at the helm of the Afghan government changed little in the administration's calculus, at least in terms of pushing for reform and anti-corruption and counter-narcotics efforts, said officials who have been involved in strategy discussions. The U.S. government feels the outcome gives it continued leverage to push for reform in Karzai's political house, the officials said.
They spoke on condition of anonymity because Obama has not announced his decision on strategy and troops.
Karzai has led Afghanistan since U.S. forces invaded to oust the Taliban in 2001. He won election in 2004, and his latest victory will give him another five-year mandate.
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Associated Press writers Anne Gearan and Matthew Lee contributed to this story.