A very worrying sign...

Russia wants to help Iran build another 6 nuclear power plants.

Russia and the United States appeared to be on a collision course over Iran today after Moscow announced that it wanted to help Tehran’s new leadership to build six more nuclear plants.

The announcement followed reports this week that the Bush administration was considering imposing sanctions on Russian and other companies suspected of helping weapons programmes in Iran, Syria or North Korea.

Washington and Moscow have long been at odds over the involvement of AtomStroiExport and other Russian companies in constructing an $800 million, 1,000-megawatt nuclear reactor at Bushehr in southern Iran.

But tensions have escalated since the election of the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran’s President, setting the stage for a tense confrontation at the G8 summit in Gleneagles next month.

Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, rejected US allegations that energy-rich Iran was using its nuclear energy programme as a cover to produce a nuclear bomb. "If we knew that Iran had plans of this kind, we would never have started cooperating with it in the nuclear sector," he said in interview with the al-Watan al-Arabi Arab weekly, a copy of which was posted on the Russian Foreign Ministry website.

How can he not know???? The Iranians talk about it all the time...