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Iran says time running out for nuclear talks with Europe
(Agencies)
Updated: 2005-04-29 21:29

LONDON - The time for negotiating over Iran's nuclear program is quickly running out, Iranian negotiator Cyrus Nasseri said ahead of talks with the EU over Tehran's determination to enrich uranium, a fuel for nuclear power plants which can also be used to make atom bombs.

"Time is much shorter than the Europeans think," Nasseri told AFP on Friday, hinting that Iran would resume uranium enrichment if the two sides failed to reach an agreement.

"Our point is we simply do not have much time. We have a fuel program and we can't hold it much further," said Nasseri, a key member of an Iranian delegation headed by Tehran's ambassador to the United Nations Mohammad Javad Zarif.

European Union negotiators Britain, Germany and France are represented at the senior-level talks Friday by their foreign ministry political directors.

Iran has suspended uranium enrichment as a confidence-building measure for the EU-Iran negotiations that started in December.

It is now waiting however for an answer from the European trio to a proposal that would allow it to enrich uranium, a process that makes fuel for nuclear power reactors but, in highly refined form, can be the explosive core of atom bombs.

The European trio is holding fast to its position that Iran must give up on all nuclear fuel activity in order to provide "objective guarantees" that it will not make atomic weapons, diplomats said.

The United States, which backs the EU diplomatic initiative but is not party to the talks, charges that Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons and must be kept from obtaining the weapons breakout capability which enrichment represents.

Diplomats have said that the Europeans are only entertaining the Iranian proposal in order to keep the talks going past Iranian presidential elections June 17, after which the EU hopes Tehran will be more settled politically and possibly able to make a deal.

But Nasseri said: "We cannot go along with waiting for elections."

"We need a clear reaction and indication as to how we are going to move forward," Nasseri said.

He said Iran still felt "the foundation for an agreement is readily at hand. I believe that both sides are close."

Asked how Iran would react if no agreement was reached Friday, Nasseri said Tehran would not break off talks.

"We are in the process of making a deal not breaking it," he said.

But he hinted that Iran would either resume uranium enrichment or take steps in that direction, such as preparing uranium for the enrichment process or testing the centrifuge machines that carry out the enrichment, saying: "We can continue negotiations but in a more balanced arrangement.

"After all we cannot keep this industry idle for so long."

It is not clear how the EU would react if Iran resumed enrichment activities, but US officials have said Washington would withdraw its support for the talks and call for Iran to be taken to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions if the enrichment activities halt was broken.

According to the text of the Iranian proposal, read to AFP by a diplomat close to the talks, the Iranians seek the "assembly, installation and testing of 3,000 centrifuges in Natanz," the site where Iran wants to build an enrichment plant and has already set up a pilot project of 164 centrifuges.

A sequence, or cascade, of about 2,000 centrifuges could make enough highly enriched uranium in a year to make one atom bomb, experts say, although Iran has said it would only make low enriched uranium.

A European diplomat close to the talks said the Iranians will get a "no" to their proposal on Friday but "camouflaged as well as possible."

"The Europeans will say they are ready to discuss the proposal but not adopt it," the diplomat said.

In The Hague on Thursday, Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi said that if there were no agreement in London: "It is our right to restore the programme" of uranium enrichment.

Iran has said repeatedly that its enrichment suspension is temporary and voluntary, as it claims the right to make nuclear fuel under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to which it is a signatory.

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