WASHINGTON, April 4: German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier urged the US government on Tuesday to address Iran’s disputed nuclear program in groundbreaking bilateral talks with Tehran on Iraq. Mr Steinmeier said before a meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that direct negotiations between Washington and Tehran held the potential to break a deadlock in the protracted crisis.

He took up the issue with White House National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley after he arrived in Washington on Monday for a two-day visit.

“Based on reports that there are apparently talks taking place arranged by the American ambassador in Baghdad with the Iranian leadership about the situation in Iraq, I advised that the topics should not be limited just to Iraq but expanded to include one of the most urgent problems confronting us all: the suspicion that Iran, the Iranian leadership, is pursuing secret atomic weapons programs,” he told reporters.

Mr Steinmeier said a debate had begun in the United States about direct US-Iranian negotiations on the nuclear issue, which he and his British counterpart Jack Straw backed, but noted the US government appeared reluctant.

“We are oversimplifying the situation if we say that there is European pressure on the United States, on the American administration — this is above all an internal American discussion,” he said.

“But at the moment, I cannot see any signs that they are prepared to take part in such discussions.”

Until now, the United States has limited its diplomacy on the Iranian nuclear program to two forums: the UN Security Council and the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency.

Iran’s charge d’affaires in Iraq, Hassan Kazemi Gomi, said on Tuesday that talks between Iran and the United States on the situation in Iraq would take place in Baghdad with Iraqi participation. No date was set.

Any direct meeting would mark a break in a near three-decade pause in direct contacts between US and Iranian officials following the country’s 1979 revolution and the US hostage drama.

Ms Rice was in Berlin on Thursday for a meeting of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — plus Germany on the Iranian nuclear program.

Ministers of the six countries discussed the road ahead one day after the council adopted a non-binding statement urging Iran to halt within 30 days all uranium enrichment activities, which Western leaders fear are part of an effort to build an atomic bomb.

Mr Steinmeier said that recent Iranian tests of a new land-to-sea missile in the Gulf were damaging to the negotiations, particularly in light of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s open calls for ‘Israel to be wiped off the map’.

Apart from Iran, Mr Steinmeier said he would discuss with Ms Rice the possible release of a German-Turkish citizen, Murat Kurnaz, held at the US prison camp in Guantanamo since 2002, as well as Ms Rice’s recent trip to Iraq and developments in Afghanistan, where Berlin has a major peacekeeping contingent.

They will also address last month’s landmark US-India nuclear deal in which the United States agreed to provide nuclear technology in exchange for India separating its civil and military atomic programs and agreeing to inspections.

Mr Steinmeier renewed his criticism that the timing of the accord was ‘not helpful’ in light of the Iranian nuclear dispute, but said Germany could come to support it if it were the ‘start of a process’ that eventually integrated India into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it has refused to sign. —AFP