Ahmad Khatami, a leading member of the Assembly of Experts and a close ally of Ali Khamenei, said on Thursday that “the Islamic Republic of Iran would not allow access to its military centers”.

“In the nuclear negotiations, the West is murmuring little by little that it wants to visit the Parchin military site and the missiles in addition to the nuclear energy sites. But, Iran will never allow this because their lack of knowledge about our military might have mislead them.”

He said if the regime opens up its military sites and they become subject of talks it will be ‘crushed’.

Ahmad Khatami’s remarks come as the six powers nuclear talks with the regime aimed at blocking its nuclear-weapons drive move towards a showdown in November.

A spectacular explosion on the night of October 6, deep inside the Parchin military base located 15 miles south of Tehran, raised new questions about the activities on the site.

The explosion and resulting fire, which the Iranian regime’s news organizations have described in only the most general terms, could be seen from Tehran.

The explosion, whether accidental or not, came at a key moment in the Iranian regime’s confrontations with the six world powers.

The regime has resisted a series of efforts by the International Atomic Energy Agency to get answers on approximately a dozen separate issues, one of which (and among the less sensitive) was the activities at Parchin a decade ago.

The head of the UN nuclear watchdog, as recently as October 20, cautioned about the Iranian regime’s claims that it is not interested in nuclear arms, saying he cannot guarantee that all the atomic activities of Tehran are civilian in nature.

Yukiya Amano, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, stated at an IAEA meeting in Vienna that the clerical regime has still not implemented all the nuclear transparency measures it had agreed to carry out by late August.

Amano said that his agency cannot “conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.”

Although the remarks are not new, Yukiya Amano’s comments are significant amid a renewed deadlock in the 12-year probe into the military dimension of the Iranian regime’s nuclear program.

The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) revealed on October 8 that the Iranian regime has moved a nuclear weaponisation and research and planning center to avoid detection by the United Nations nuclear watchdog.

It was the NCRI that exposed the Iranian regime’s clandestine uranium enrichment plant at Natanz and a heavy water facility at Arak in 2002. After this revelation the Iranian regime acknowledged having an enrichment program.

According to the information from sources inside Iran, the Iranian regime moved the Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research (SPND) in July to a secure site in a defense ministry complex about 1.5 km (1 mile) from its former location.

To divert attention from key elements of the center the Iranian regime has left “non-sensitive” sections at the old site.