LONDON, April 29: The time for negotiating over Iran’s nuclear program is quickly running out, Iranian official Cyrus Nasseri said on Friday before talks with the EU on Tehran’s determination to enrich uranium. “Time is much shorter than the Europeans think,” Mr Nasseri said, hinting that Iran would resume uranium enrichment if the two sides failed to reach an agreement.

Britain, France and Germany are holding fast to their 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 prevented from obtaining the weapons capability which enrichment represents.

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

The European trio are represented at Friday’s senior-level talks by their foreign ministry political directors.

In Tehran, Iran’s powerful former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said His country “wants to possess all the branches of nuclear technology, including enrichment, and it will do so at all costs”.

But both Mr Nasseri and Hashemi Rafsanjani said Iran would not break off the talks, and a European diplomat said the Iranians were unlikely to take any action that would cause the EU to give up on negotiations and join the United States in calling for Tehran to be taken to the UN Security Council for possible international sanctions.

“We will be patient and we will continue these lengthy and fruitless negotiations until you are persuaded that we are not seeking nuclear weapons,” Mr Rafsanjani said, referring to the Europeans and the United States.

But in London, a British foreign ministry spokesman played down any hopes of a major breakthrough at Friday’s meeting.

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.

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

But Mr 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,” Mr Nasseri said.

According to the text of the Iranian proposal, Tehran 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 would get a ‘no’ to their proposal but ‘camouflaged as well as possible’.

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

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. —AFP