To isolate Iran,US presses inspectors on nuclear data

If the United Nations’ watchdog group agrees to publicise the evidence,including new data from recent months,it would almost certainly revive a debate that has been dormant during the Arab Spring about how aggressively the US and its allies,including Israel,should move to halt Iran’s suspected weapons programme.

Over the longer term,several senior Obama administration officials said in interviews,they are mulling a ban on financial transactions with Iran’s central bank. Also being considered is an expansion of the ban on the purchase of petroleum products sold by companies controlled by the country’s elite military force,the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

The Revolutionary Guards are also believed to oversee the military side of the nuclear programme,and they are the parent of the Quds Force,which Washington has accused of directing the assassination plot.

The decision to press the International Atomic Energy Agency was brewing even before the plot against the Saudi ambassador was discovered,but that discovery prompted the White House to pursue a full-court,public press of the agency to release the sensitive intelligence.

Officials familiar with the evidence say it creates extraordinarily uncomfortable questions for the Iranians to answer,but does not definitively point to the construction of a weapon. Instead,it details work on individual technologies essential for designing and detonating a nuclear device,including how to turn uranium into bomb fuel and how to cast conventional explosives in a shape that can set off a nuclear blast.