Nuclear facility was for giant cake, claims Ahmadinejad

Ahmadinejad visits the controversial cake-making facilities at Fordow in late 2011

TEHRAN: Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has revealed that the controversial Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, the previously secret facility dug deep into a mountainside on the Great Salt Desert and considered the new nerve centre for Iran’s growing nuclear programme, had actually been developing a giant surprise cake for Israel.

“We were hoping to put aside all the years of bitterness with Israel and start afresh. To celebrate, we were making the world’s biggest Victoria Sponge, which we’ve had a team of chefs working on over the past few months at Fordow,” claimed Ahmadinejad at a Tehran press conference yesterday. “It was going to have giant candles and a big smily face drawn across the top in jelly tots.”

But Ahmadinejad said that Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu had “ruined everything” with his threat of military strikes against the facility, adding that the cake – which was at the icing stage of development – had now been scrapped.

“Obviously we didn’t want to say anything, because it was supposed to be a surprise,” he said. “But following Israel’s repeated talk of bunker bombs and the like, we’ve had no choice to reveal our sugary intentions.”

Ahmadinejad claimed that the cake development had now been replaced with plans to “build some kind of nuclear warhead”, and that all plans to reconcile with Israel had been called off.

“And Netanyahu hasn’t got anyone to blame to himself,” he added. “The only cake we’ll be making now is Yellowcake, a kind of uranium concentrate powder obtained from leach solutions, in an intermediate step in the processing of uranium ores.”