TEHRAN: Iran has 6,000 active centrifuges for enriching uranium, its president was quoted as saying yesterday, suggesting a rapid expansion of nuclear work the West suspects is aimed at making bombs.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s announcement was likely to irritate major powers, which have offered Iran economic and other incentives to persuade it to suspend enrichment activity that can have both civilian and military uses.

Western officials said after a meeting with Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator in Geneva on July 19 it had two weeks to reply to an offer of a halt to new steps toward more UN sanctions if Iran froze the expansion of its nuclear program.

Iran has so far ruled out a freeze to start preliminary talks or suspension of enrichment to start formal negotiations on the incentives package proposed by the six world powers — the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany.

“Today, we have 6,000 active centrifuges,” state television quoted Ahmadinejad as saying, adding Western capitals had backed down and now accepted this level of operation.

The UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said in May that Tehran had 3,500 centrifuges working at its Natanz facility in central Iran.

The UN Security Council has imposed three sets of sanctions in a standoff that goes back to the revelation in 2002 by an exiled opposition group of the existence of a uranium enrichment facility and heavy water plant in Iran.

Iran, the world’s fourth-largest crude producer, says its nuclear activities are aimed solely at generating electricity.

It says it is ready for negotiations but will not accept any preconditions or threats in a row that has helped send oil prices sharply higher, despite falls in the last two weeks.

“Iran does not negotiate with anyone over its obvious nuclear right,” Ahmadinejad said in the city of Mashhad.

State radio quoted him as saying the West had retreated in the dispute and had now “accepted that Iran would continue uranium enrichment with its current 6,000 centrifuges.”

In a policy shift, a US diplomat attended the Geneva talks and Ahmadinejad said this represented a “success” for Iran.

Iran launched 3,000 centrifuges, a basis for industrial scale enrichment, at Natanz in 2007. But they are the 1970s-vintage P1 design, prone to breakdown.