Instead, he suggested turning the stockpile into fuel plates, under monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Quoting "an Iranian source who has proven reliable in the past", Slavin says the Iranian opening offer includes a halt to production of 20% enriched uranium and the conversion of the current stockpile into fuel rods for the Tehran Research Reactor, as a reassurance it would not be used one day as raw material for a bomb.
Areva in particular is currently lobbying heavily for the UK government to commit to a new plant (likely at Sellafield) to convert the country's 100-tonne plutonium stockpile into "mixed-oxide" fuel (MOX), which can be burned in its EPR stations.
Under the November 2013 interim nuclear deal, production of medium-enriched uranium ceased at Fordo, and Iran turned its stockpile into forms that were less of a proliferation risk.
Even assuming that the stockpile has been properly maintained, stocked with consumables, and is regularly checked out, it would still take quite a while to inflate that stockpile into an army.
Latest case in point: Under the interim accord, Iran was supposed to process some of its nuclear gas stockpile into a form that is harder to use in a bomb.
China has also become the world's fastest-growing importer of oil, with foreign purchases surging nearly a third this year, although some of those imports went into stockpiles in January and February as a precaution in case the war in Iraq disrupted shipments from the Middle East.
Maybe the whole event is an elaborate piece of theatre, to make the ivory "disappear" from the stockpiles and into the hands of corrupt officials and politicians?
Howard Kurtz wrote in The Post yesterday that the article, which questioned how much proof the administration had amassed of supposed Iraqi weapons stockpiles, "ran into stiff resistance from the paper's editors".
The real threat to global security would emerge if Kim suddenly died or lost his grip on power Dr Nilsson-Wright addexplainingning that such a scenario could create a massive regional power vacuum and is likely to lead to the country's vast nuclear stockpile vanishing into the black market.
