British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Thursday called for tightening European sanctions against Iran over its suspect nuclear program, specifically targeting investments in liquefied natural gas.
"In the next few weeks, we want to extend the measures and sanctions to include investment in liquefied natural gas. I believe that sends another signal to the regime that what is happening is unacceptable," said Brown.
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The prime minister's comments came as he met at the White House with US President George W. Bush, who said anyone who thinks that Iran's uranium enrichment program has no military applications "is, in my judgment, naive."
"Our position is clear: That we're going to work together along with other nations to make it abundantly clear to the Iranian regime that they must not have the capability of developing a nuclear weapon," said Bush.
Earlier Thursday, the head of the UN Atomic watchdog said Iran's progress in developing uranium enrichment is slow and recent additions to its nuclear fuel production complex have only been older-model centrifuges.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Iran had between 3,300 and 3,400 centrifuges of the 1970s vintage P-1 type operational in the Natanz enrichment hall, up from 3,000 at the end of last year.
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He urged Iran to refrain from speeding up its enrichment campaign until a dispute between the Islamic Republic and world powers over suspicions about its nuclear intentions was resolved.
"They are basically making some centrifuges of the old type, the P-1 centrifuges that have already been there. The rate of progress on that has not been very fast," ElBaradei told a news conference during a visit to Berlin.
"I continue to call on Iran not to speed the process because we first need to have an agreement before Iran moves forward with its enrichment program."
Iran said last week it had installed almost 500 more centrifuges at Natanz under plans to bring a further 6,000 on line.
Tehran said it was testing an advanced centrifuge, which analysts say could refine uranium two or three times faster than the temperamental P-1 in Natanz's pilot wing.
Diplomats monitoring Iran's program told Reuters on April 3 that Iran had brought some advanced centrifuges into the main plant, although none were yet running.
Iran has yet to show it can run thousands of centrifuges in unison at high speed for long periods, the key to enriching significant quantities of uranium as fuel for power plants or atomic bombs, depending on the configuration of the machines.
Analysts believe Iran aims gradually to replace its start-up P-1 centrifuge with a new generation it adapted from a P-2 design, obtained via black markets from the West.
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