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Iran said on Sunday it has found enough uranium in its own mines to get around a United Nations ban on uranium ore imports that was meant to prevent the Islamic nation from going forward with its nuclear program.

Iran made its claim a day before a new round of nuclear talks with world powers that want to rein in Iran’s uranium enrichment — a process that can be used either to make fuel for energy or atomic bombs.

“No matter how much effort they put into their sanctions … our nuclear activities will proceed and they will witness greater achievements in the future,” nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi said on state-run Press TV.

The White House said it was aware Iran has been trying to develop domestically the ore known as “yellowcake” and hoped Iran would go into talks set to start today in Geneva “with the seriousness of purpose” needed to address “international concerns” over its nuclear program.

“Given that Iran’s own supply of uranium is not enough for a peaceful nuclear energy program, this calls into further question Iran’s intentions and raises additional concerns,” said Mike Hammer, spokesman for the National Security Council.

Iran’s rulers have flouted several U.N. Security Council resolutions against their program, which the West alleges is for making bombs, not energy. Iran has the fourth-largest oil reserves in the world.

In 2009, Western nations claimed Iran was running out of raw uranium it imported before sanctions were imposed.

“This demonstrates that the diplomatic approach has been a waste of time,” former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton said. “It’s done nothing but give Iran time it needs to perfect its nuclear weapons program.”

Bolton, speaking on Fox News, criticized the U.S. State Department as the “What, me worry?” crowd and said that neither negotiations nor more sanctions would prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb.

Salehi, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and Iran’s vice president, said the yellowcake was produced at the Gachin uranium mine in southern Iran and delivered to the uranium conversion facility in Isfahan for reprocessing. He said a bigger uranium mine at Saghand, in central Iran, will be inaugurated “in the not-too-distant future.”

The Gachin uranium mill processes ore from a nearby mine into yellowcake. The processing is part of the early stages before actual enrichment of uranium. Yellowcake is then taken to the Isfahan facility to be processed into uranium hexafluoride, which later can be turned into a gas used as feedstock for enriching uranium.

Uranium enriched to low grades is used for fuel in nuclear reactors, but further enrichment makes it suitable for atomic bombs.

Salehi did not provide details on how much yellowcake had been transferred to Isfahan, but said the shipments, for now, would be carried out “continuously.”

Press TV showed a large, covered truck carrying the yellowcake.

The U.S. appears to have made little headway in seeking closer cooperation between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to block wealthy Saudi sympathizers from funding Islamic conservatives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, senior Western and Arab diplomats have told CBS News after carefully examining some of the State Department documents revealed on WikiLeaks.

Pieced together, the leaked documents for the first time show evidence of underlying tensions between Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari’s regime and the ruling Saudi establishment of King Abdullah.

One of the documents released by WikiLeaks to the media quotes the King saying that Pakistan can never progress as long as Zardari remains the country’s president — an especially disparaging remark by the Saudi monarch towards Pakistan’s head of state.

The friction, according to one U.S. official who spoke to CBS News on background, “has revealed the many challenges in seeking” closer Saudi-Pakistan cooperation, notably in areas such as the flow of finances from Saudi Arabia to recipients in Pakistan who work as fronts for Islamic zealots linked to the Taliban.

“The tension in the Saudi-Pakistan relationship must be cause for concern to the U.S. Much time and effort has been spent in making this (Saudi-Pakistan) relationship work better, but the results are not very encouraging,” said a Western ambassador in Islamabad who spoke to CBS News on condition of anonymity.

Elaborating on American interest in making the Saudis and Pakistanis establish a close working relationship, the ambassador revealed that for the past three to five years, the U.S. has worked behind the scenes to block the flow of Saudi funds to Islamic outlets in Pakistan, “but in Washington, I believe this effort is still not seen to have borne fruit.”

Historically, Saudi Arabia stepped up its support to Islamic zealots in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980s, seeking to push “jihad,” or holy war — a term used to define the Afghan-based armed resistance opposing the occupying Soviet forces. During this time, a large number of Islamic hardliners (including Osama bin Laden) traveled from countries like Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan to join the resistance.

That effort helped Saudi Arabia consolidate its long-term contacts in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region with Sunni Muslims who supported the Wahabi brand of Islam that is practiced across the oil rich desert kingdom. Historically, for most Pakistanis Islam has made inroads into countries of South Asia through the more conciliatory Sufi tradition of Islam (which stands in sharp contrast to the more rigid interpretation of Islam by Wahabi Muslims).

A week after the WikiLeaks revelations of King Abdullah’s remarks, a politician from Pakistan’s ruling party (known as the Pakistan People’s Party, or PPP, led by Zardari) told CBS News that the relationship between the two countries had “become lukewarm.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to discuss the subject with journalists, the politician claimed that Zardari had worked systematically to curb the influence of Wahabi clergy over officials in his ruling structure — a position that may have irked the Saudi establishment.

“Once the Saudis thought that the Pakistani government wanted to curb the influence of the Wahabis in the ruling structure, they pulled back from any significant support to Pakistan,” said the official.

Last month, the president of a privately-owned Pakistani bank in the southern port city of Karachi told CBS News that authorities had tightened their watch on large incoming transfers in foreign currencies from the Middle East to recipients in Pakistan, mainly to block funds for the Taliban and their sympathizers.

“To make certain that any large-scale movement of funds for suspected terrorism-related purposes does not go unnoticed, we try to keep a close watch,” said the bank president in a background briefing to a small group of news organizations, including CBS.

But the Western ambassador who spoke to CBS News in Islamabad said efforts such as the ones claimed by the private bank’s president “are still not strong enough to make a difference to the funds going to people with militancy-related links.

“Eventually, you have to close the tap. The tap is with the Saudis, and they don’t seem interested in closing it off.”

Iran on Sunday claimed for the first time to have used domestically mined uranium ore to make the material needed for uranium enrichment. It called the step a major advance in its atomic program, sending a defiant message before a new round of talks on Iran’s suspect nuclear activities.

Western experts said the progress appeared to be more symbolic than substantive and did not bear immediately on whether Iran could accelerate its efforts at enriching uranium, which can fuel either reactors or atom bombs.

But Iran’s successful processing of uranium ore from a domestically mined source, which it has been working on for years, suggested the Iranians had found a way to bypass United Nations sanctions that ban them from importing raw uranium.

The announcement also reflected Iran’s intention to show it remains undaunted in its pursuit of nuclear capabilities despite some significant recent setbacks. Those setbacks include increased economic isolation from a range of United Nations sanctions, the mysterious bombing attacks on two Iranian nuclear scientists in Tehran last week and an acknowledgment by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that some of Iran’s centrifuges, used to purify uranium, had been successfully singled out by Internet saboteurs using malignant software.

The White House said Sunday that Iran’s announcement was not unexpected but that it reinforced international suspicions about Iran’s motives for enriching uranium at all.

In Tehran on Sunday, Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s nuclear program, said the country had succeeded for the first time in domestically producing uranium concentrate from uranium ore mined inside Iran. The concentrate, known as yellowcake, is a precursor to the uranium fed into spinning centrifuges for enrichment.

“This means that Iran has become self-sufficient in the entire fuel cycle,” Mr. Salehi declared. He said at a televised news conference that the announcement meant “we will be taking part in the negotiations with strength and power.”

Mr. Salehi, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said the yellowcake was produced at the Gachin uranium mine in southern Iran and delivered to the uranium conversion facility in the central city of Isfahan for processing into uranium destined for the thousands of centrifuges of Natanz.

Mr. Salehi said the delivery was evidence that last week’s mysterious bombings of the Iranian scientists would not slow the country’s progress. One of the scientists died and the other was wounded.

The two days of talks that begin Monday in Geneva are the first on Iran’s nuclear program in more than a year. Six world powers — the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany — are seeking reassurances that Tehran’s ambitions are peaceful.

Iran bought yellowcake from South Africa in the 1980s, but those supplies are running low.

Even so, Western experts say Iran can keep the centrifuges at its Natanz plant in the desert running for decades because over the years it has converted so much yellowcake to uranium meant for enrichment.

“This is a face-saving announcement,” David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that tracks nuclear proliferation, said in an interview. “For years, they’ve been saying that they are mining. So here’s finally some proof.”

In a statement, a spokesman for the National Security Council, Mike Hammer, said Iran’s yellowcake announcement was “not unexpected” given that Iran is now banned from importing the material under United Nations sanctions and that it has worked to develop its own program of mining and indigenous production.

“However,” he added, “this calls into further question Iran’s intentions and raises additional concerns at a time when Iran needs to address the concerns of the international community.”

Since 2006, the United Nations Security Council has repeatedly called on Iran to halt its program of uranium enrichment and has punished it with four rounds of sanctions. Tehran insists it wants enriched uranium to fuel reactors for making electricity and medical isotopes, while the West fears that it wants the material as a way to fuel atom bombs.

Ahead of the Geneva talks, Mr. Hammer said, the United States and its allies are looking to see if Iran will enter into discussions “with the seriousness of purpose required to begin to address international concerns.”