Iran has notified the UN nuclear watchdog it rejects key parts of a draft deal to send abroad most of its enriched uranium, designed to ease fears the material could be used to make nuclear weapons, diplomats said yesterday.
Iran has also insisting on a simultaneous exchange of fuel, diplomats said.
One Western diplomat, speaking on condition on anonymity, said Iran gave its response at a meeting between the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) new chief Yukiya Amano and Iranian Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh earlier this month.
The IAEA refused to say whether the meeting took place or on its possible content.
The diplomat, however, said Soltanieh reiterated the Islamic republic’s earlier position, including the demand for a simultaneous fuel swap, which the West has persistently ruled out as unacceptable.
The Iranians did not give their response in writing, however, the diplomat said.
Instead, the IAEA drew up the minutes of the meeting and then asked Soltanieh to verify that the memo correctly reflected Iran’s position.
“His response was ‘yes,’” the diplomat said.
Another diplomat also said it was unclear whether Iran had actually delivered a written response. But “certainly there was no agreement to the TRR [Tehran Research Reactor] proposal,” the diplomat said.
Under the terms of a plan, hammered out under the IAEA’s auspices last October, Iran was to have shipped abroad most of its stockpile of enriched uranium for processing into fuel for a reactor that makes radio-isotopes for medical use.
The proposals, brokered by the IAEA’s then chief Mohamed ElBaradei, were seen as a way of appeasing Western fears that Iran was stockpiling uranium for a covert nuclear weapons program, because it would have seen most of the Islamic Republic’s uranium taken out of the country before any reactor fuel was dispatched in return.
But Tehran declined for months to give any formal response to the offer, with Iranian officials taking seemingly contradictory positions on it.
World powers gave Iran until the end of last year to accept the deal but the deadline was ignored, prompting talk of fresh sanctions against the Islamic republic.
In Washington on Tuesday, US State Department spokesman Philip Crowley commented: “I am not sure that they have delivered a formal response, but it is clearly an inadequate response.”
On Jan. 5, Iran repeated its counter-proposal for a staged fuel swap, but left the “details” open to discussion.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki insisted that Tehran in fact had until the end of this month to reach a uranium swap deal, stressing it will press on with plans to produce highly enriched nuclear fuel if there is no agreement.
Mottaki gave the West a one-month “ultimatum” to accept the Iranian counter-proposal.
Iran is already under three sets of UN Security Council sanctions over its defiance and refusal to suspend enrichment, which lies at the heart of international fears about its nuclear program.
Meanwhile, US intelligence agencies were finalizing a new assessment of Tehran’s nuclear program that sees Iran pushing forward with nuclear weapons research but not yet relaunching its bomb program in full, US officials said.
The analysts are revising a national intelligence estimate (NIE) that was expected to bring the US more into line with its European allies about the state of Iran’s nuclear program, officials said on Tuesday.
The key assertions of the 2007 US report — that Iran halted its nuclear weapon design and weaponization work, as well as its covert uranium conversion and uranium enrichment related-activities in 2003 — have long been disputed by some European spy agencies.
US officials have signaled at least some of those assertions will require revision in the new NIE, which could be completed in weeks and may bolster the US argument for new UN sanctions on Iran.
But they stressed that the differences would be nuanced.
“Basically, we’re talking about research [resuming] — not about the Iranians barreling full steam ahead on a bomb program,” a US official said on condition of anonymity.
IAEA officials had no immediate comment.
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