VIENNA, Sept 11: The United States now realizes that it does not have the majority it needs at the UN nuclear watchdog to bring Iran before the UN Security Council over Tehran's alleged atomic weapons program , a US official said on Friday.
"We recognize we are not going to get majority support for a non-compliance finding (to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) in September" at the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) 35-nation board of governors meeting in Vienna, which begins on Monday, a US state department official said.
The official said US Undersecretary of State for arms control and international security John Bolton was now talking in Geneva with European diplomats "about a trigger mechanism" to effectively set a deadline for Iran before the following IAEA board meeting in November.
The trigger could be "to require that Iran suspend immediately and fully all uranium enrichment-related work" or "for Iran to grant complete, immediate, unrestricted access to whatever locations the IAEA deems necesssary" or for Iran to provide by a certain date, such as Oct 31, "full information on all imported materials and components relevant to the P1 and P2 centrifuge program", the official said.
Uranium can be enriched through centrifuges into a highly refined form that can be used as fuel for civilian reactors or to make an atomic bomb.
Europe's three main countries - Britain, France and Germany - are against taking Iran to the Security Council as they stress cooperating with Tehran to get it to come clean about its program.
But diplomats said the three countries were now backing the US call for Iran to fully suspend enrichment, including the first step of converting mineral uranium yellowcake into the gas that is the feedstock for making the enriched uranium that can be used in bombs.
A "tactical gap" between Washington and the European countries was narrowing but "we have ways to go", Mr Bolton told a news conference in Geneva, following a US-hosted meeting with his counterparts from the other Group of Eight (G8) industrialized countries.
"The objective that the United States has been pursuing has been to ensure that Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapons capability and that is an objective shared by all of the G-8 countries," Mr Bolton said.
"There is no disagreement on our broad objective. What we have tried to do here today and yesterday was to close the tactical gap that has existed between the United States and ... Britain France and Germany," he said.
"We made progress in that regard here ... I think discussions will continue over the weekend and into next week and we will see what we are able to do."-AFP