Europe pushing Iran to give up uranium enrichment, US watching warily
AFP
Date: 04-18-05
VIENNA (AFP) - EU-Iran talks reopen to make sure Tehran provides air-tight guarantees that it will not make atomic weapons amid agreement by European diplomats that Iran must cease uranium enrichment as the United States is watching the process warily.
European Union negotiators Britain, France and Germany are studying an Iranian proposal that would allow some enrichment, and there have been hints of a crack in their unity over this issue a day before talks start in Geneva.
But the European trio is "rock-solid on cessation" by Iran of uranium enrichment, which makes fuel for nuclear reactors but can also be the explosive core of nuclear bombs, one European diplomat told AFP.
The United States charges that Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons and a US official said: "We trust the EU3 (Britain, France and Germany) but we are also watching closely to ensure they continue to hold firm on insisting that the only objective guarantee acceptable to the international community is the full cessation and dismantling" of Iran's nuclear fuel cycle pursuits.
Iran urged the Americans not to meddle in their negotiations with the EU.
"For the moment, it's best for the Americans to follow the process from the grandstand as spectators, and leave negotiators to do their job," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said Sunday in Tehran.
Iran suspended uranium enrichment in November as a confidence-building measure to start the EU-Iran talks, which offer Iran trade, security and technology rewards if it abandons enrichment.
Iran however refuses to do so permanently, saying its nuclear program is peaceful and claiming that it has the right to make nuclear fuel under the provisions of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, regardless of US charges that it is secretly developing atomic weapons.
The European trio is to meet with Iran in Geneva in a nuclear issues working group, ahead of a meeting of senior foreign ministry officials from the two sides scheduled for April 29 in London, diplomats said.
Iran proposed at such a senior-level meeting in Paris in March a project to do low-scale enrichment in a pilot project, and the Europeans agreed to consider this.
The European diplomat said however that the EU position remains that "cessation means cessation."
The EU wants "objective guarantees" from Tehran that its nuclear program is a peaceful one.
Iran is trying to soften this demand, and some European diplomats told AFP that French President Jacques Chirac had said in February at a meeting in Paris with the Iranian negotiator, Hassan Rowhani, that France would agree to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) determining what these objective guarantees would be.
Other diplomats said this was not the case and that Chirac had only said that the Vienna-based UN nuclear watchdog would have a role to play.
The IAEA is a verification arm of the United Nations rather than a policy-making body.
A non-European diplomat said Iran felt it could get a better deal from the IAEA than it would get from the Europeans, who agree with the United States that Tehran should not be allowed to develop the capacity to make nuclear weapons.
One European diplomat said that the idea of having the IAEA determine the objective guarantees "was launched at the Paris meeting as one possibility and was not accepted."
French foreign ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei said: "France is trying to obtain objective guarantees on Iran's peaceful use of nuclear energy." He refused to comment further.
Gary Samore, a non-proliferation expert at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies, told AFP that the Europeans were considering the Iranian pilot plant proposal as a tactic to keep the talks going.
The Iranians are trying to get the number of centrifuges "to a number that would be able to produce a weapon's worth of highly enriched uranium in a year," Samore said. This number is approximately 2,000 centrifuges.
Centrifuges, placed in sequence, refine increasingly enriched uranium with each cycle.
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