[ analysis ] On Monday, Sept. 21, 2009, the Iranian government sent a letter to the International Atomic Energy Organization (IAEA) to say it was constructing a second uranium enrichment facility near the holy city of Qom, 100 miles south of Tehran.
Four days later, in a hastily arranged news conference in the midst of the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, President Barack Obama, flanked by Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain and President Nicholas Sarkozy of France, declared that the United States, Britain and France had provided the Agency the day before with detailed information about the Qom facility.
According to Obama and other U.S. officials, Western intelligence agencies had been monitoring the construction of the facility for years. The President called the new development another example of Iran’s violation of its international obligations with respect to its nuclear program. This was echoed by some experts, who immediately declared that the Qom facility represented a gross violation of Iran’s Safeguards Agreement, which it signed in 1974.
