VIENNA, June 2: Iran’s president insisted on his country’s right to nuclear technology on Friday despite facing what Washington called a ‘moment of truth’ over a programme that could produce atomic weapons.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s comments suggested Tehran might have decided to reject offers of incentives and negotiations from six of the world’s top powers in return for ending atomic fuel activities.
“Pressure of some western countries to force Iran to abandon its right (to nuclear technology) will not get a result,” IRNA quoted Mr Ahmadinejad as saying.
Although the president did not mention uranium enrichment, Mohammad Saeedi, deputy head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, said the country’s plans included such work.
“Iran is determined to go ahead with its nuclear enrichment work for peaceful purposes,” he told ISNA.
But US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held out the possibility that she would meet Iranian officials.
“It depends of course on what Iran does,” she told National Public Radio.
“If Iran is prepared to verifiably suspend its programme and enter into negotiations, then we’ll determine the level (of representation) but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the ministers meet at some point,” she said.
Iran was facing a ‘moment of truth’, she told CBS.
National Intelligence Director John Negroponte told BBC Radio that Iran could have an atomic bomb as early as 2010 and accused Tehran of being the top state sponsor of terrorism.
The White House said Mr Ahmadinejad’s remarks were just a ‘negotiating position’ and urged Iran to study incentives approved by United States, British, French, German Russian and Chinese foreign ministers on Thursday, before officially responding.
European officials would give Iranian officials a detailed presentation of the incentives in a couple of days and a formal answer was hoped for within weeks, White House spokesman Tony Snow said. Russian President Vladimir Putin said it was too early to speak about sanctions against Iran.
“As far as sanctions are concerned, we think it is a bit too early at the moment to talk about that,” Mr Putin said at a meeting with the chiefs of international news agencies in Moscow.
“We need to have a deep conversation with the Iranian leadership. Only after that can we talk about the next step.”
But Ms Rice told CNN that Moscow and Beijing had signed up in Vienna to two ‘quite robust’ paths — one leading Iran to international integration with incentives and another towards isolation via various penalties.
A European Union diplomat said Russia and China had agreed not to block any United Nations sanctions against Tehran, but could opt out of particular punitive measures.
“There is something like a catalogue of sanctions and we can pick and choose from them. The agreement reached ... is also that Russia and China can abstain from any sanctions, but not say no,” the diplomat said.
Western officials would not say if the package specified what sanctions Iran could face, and Russia said military action was not on the table now.
“I can say unambiguously that all the agreements from yesterday’s meetings rule out in any circumstances the use of military force,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was quoted by RIA news agency as saying.
If Iran rebuffed the incentives, the minister said, the big powers would return to discussing a UN Security Council resolution ordering Tehran to stop enriching uranium. But he said it would not mention sanctions.—Reuters
