Chairman of the Iranian Parliament Committee for Foreign Policy and National Security Alaeddin Boroujerdi: Our Response to the U.N. Sanctions Resolution Was to Declare that We Will Build 3,000 Additional Centrifuges

Following are excerpts from an interview with Alaeddin Boroujerdi, Chairman of the Iranian Parliament’s Committee for Foreign Policy and National Security, which aired on Iranian TV Channel 2 on December 23, 2006.

Alaeddin Boroujerdi: Our first practical response [to the U.N. sanctions] was to declare that we would install the 3,000 centrifuges very soon. The whole purpose of the West and the Americans is to prevent this from happening, but the result will be the exact opposite. This demonstrates the lack of reason that dominates the way the Americans and the West behave. We could have reached a reasonable understanding through negotiations, in which, by accepting inspection... We have always accepted inspection, because we are members of the IAEA, and we respect its regulations. We could have made progress within an agreed framework. They did not accept this, and that is why our two chains, each of which contains 164 [centrifuges], will turn into 3,000 centrifuges in one leap. There is an additional, very important point: If we assume that 54,000 centrifuges are meant to be installed at Natanz, the product of this... The nuclear fuel production necessary for our power plants... Our parliament has approved production of 20,000 MW of nuclear energy in the coming twenty years. This means that we must build twenty 1,000 MW power plants. The product of Natanz can meet the needs of only one power plant. This means that we have no choice but to import fuel. We have no problem with importing fuel. But since we don't trust the West... Just like the Americans were committed to supplying the fuel for the Tehran reactor, and did not do so, and just like the Germans were committed to building the Bushehr power plant , and did not do so... We have absolutely no trust in the West, and therefore we have no choice but to do this.

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Sooner or later, the Americans and the West will have to accept the fact that that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a country with nuclear technology and knowledge. They’ve made great efforts to ignore this, to deny it, and not to believe it, and they wanted to force the Islamic Republic to abandon this knowledge. This has not happened, and will not happen.