Obama says secret nuke site deepens ‘growing concern’ about Iran

U.S. President Barack Obama and the leaders of Britain and France are publicly demanding that Iran open up a secret nuclear fuel facility to international inspectors.

Led by Mr. Obama at the site of the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown joined the United States on Friday in chastising Tehran for operating the facility covertly.

Mr. Obama said the site “deepens a growing concern” that Iran has failed to live up to its international obligations. He said that Iran “is breaking rules that all nations must follow, endangering the world non-nuclear proliferation regime ... and the security of the world.”

Iran has kept the facility, 100 miles (160 kilometers) southwest of Tehran, hidden from weapons inspectors, but the U.S. has long known of its existence, a senior White House Official told

Associated Press.

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, made no mention of the facility this week while attending the U.N. General Assembly in New York, but said that his country had fully cooperated with international nuclear inspectors.

Iran is under three sets of U.N. Security Council sanctions for refusing to freeze enrichment at what had been its single known enrichment plant, which is being monitored by the IAEA.