Iran’s President Vows to Keep Enriching Uranium Despite Expiration of U.N. Deadline to Stop
Unbowed by international pressure, Iran’s president vowed yesterday to press ahead with the country’s uranium enrichment program, even as a United Nations deadline to shut the program down passed.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran had a right to pursue nuclear technology and “will continue our work to reach our right in the shortest possible time,” according to the ISNA news agency. Speaking in Siahkal in northern Iran, Mr. Ahmadinejad said, “Obtaining this technology is very important for our country’s development and honor.”
The United Nations seems unlikely to take swift action, because of a sense that the limited sanctions already imposed on Iran by the Security Council are working. Two Council ambassadors in New York and officials in Washington indicated that Iran’s stance had become less truculent and more flexible.
A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, expected to be released today, will detail the extent of Iran’s compliance with the United Nations demands.
The report may intensify the debate among Western governments about whether to impose more punishing sanctions. It may also deepen the debate within the Bush administration over whether and when to take military action.
Though Mr. Ahmadinejad took a hard line yesterday, he has said in recent days that Iran is prepared to negotiate and offered to stop enriching uranium if Western nations did the same — a proposal that the Bush administration dismissed out of hand.
“Do you believe that’s a serious offer?” Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, said yesterday. “It’s pretty clear that the international community has said to the Iranians, ‘You can have nuclear power, but we don’t want you to have the ability to build nuclear weapons.’ And that is an offer we continue to make.”
Germany, which along with France and Britain has led negotiations with Iran on behalf of the European Union, held out hope that talks could be reconvened, but only if Tehran sent clear signals of its sincerity.
American-led efforts to build pressure on Iran gained a prominent backer yesterday when India announced that it had banned the export of anything that could assist the Iranian nuclear program.
In contrast to past instances, when the United States and other countries have cited Iran’s noncompliance as a reason for prompt international action, diplomats said that the only political conversations now in progress about Iran were taking place within national governments, and that United Nations ambassadors in New York had not yet met to discuss their ideas. They said efforts to formulate a United Nations response to the broken deadline would probably take many weeks.
Iran’s President Vows to Keep Enriching Uranium Despite Expiration of U.N. Deadline to Stop - New York Times
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