The EU warned Iran on Tuesday that it would end two years of negotiations over nuclear projects if Tehran fulfils threats to end its freeze on the enrichment of uranium.
Amid a mood of mounting emergency and showdown between the West and the incoming regime of President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, new United States intelligence sounded a less alarmist note about the potential crisis, despite sabre-rattling from the Bush administration and Israel.
A US intelligence estimate on Iran, ordered last January, concluded that it could be 10 years before Tehran had sufficient material to arm a nuclear warhead, the Washington Post reported.
On Monday Iran notified the UN’s nuclear inspectorate that it was removing the UN seals on equipment for converting raw uranium into gaseous form for enrichment, ending a freeze agreed with the EU last November. The move came days before the EU is to table detailed incentives to Iran in an attempt to persuade it to scrap uranium enrichment.
The deal was negotiated by Britain, France and Germany for the EU, with the tacit support of Washington.
The EU troika responded to the Iranian move on Tuesday in a letter to Tehran’s chief nuclear negotiator, implicitly warning they would join the US for the first time in two years of dispute in taking the issue to the UN security council in New York.
”Were Iran to resume currently suspended activities, our negotiations would be brought to an end and we would have no option but to pursue other courses of action,” the EU letter said.
While Chancellor Gerhard Schröder called Iran’s manoeuvres ”threatening”, the French government warned of a looming ”major international crisis”.
Despite the manoeuvring, operations have not yet started at the uranium conversion plant at Isfahan, 300 miles south of Tehran. While Iranian officials said the decision to restart activities was ”irreversible”, a senior official also said Iran would not break the UN seals unilaterally, providing scope for a climbdown.
”This Iranian affair is very serious,” said the French foreign minister, Philippe Douste-Blazy. ”It could be the beginning of a major international crisis.”
If Iran started processing uranium ore into uranium hexafluoride, the minister said, the EU troika would summon an emergency meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency and push for referral to the UN security council and the prospect of sanctions.
The Americans, in particular, have pushed for referral and sanctions for two years, convinced that Tehran has long had an illicit bomb programme. While supporting that contention, the new US intelligence takes a more sanguine view, surmising it could be 2015 before Iran can build a bomb, considerably longer than previous estimates.
The two years of negotiations between Iran and the EU trio are on the cusp of collapse because Tehran, in advance, deems the EU offer to be made this weekend as unacceptable.
The sticking point concerns uranium enrichment. As a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty, Iran is entitled to enrich uranium for a civil programme and insists that the EU acknowledges that right. The Europeans baulk at this. By contrast, while agreeing Iran may conduct some activities in what is known as the nuclear fuel cycle, they demand that Iran forgo the right to enrich uranium until there are ”objective guarantees” the programme is peaceful. Effectively that means making the freeze permanent.
Iran, in what it views as a national project, has spent more than 20 years, mostly in secret, developing a sophisticated enrichment programme and is unlikely to mothball it permanently.
In an interview with the AP news agency, Hans Blix, the former UN chief weapons inspector said on tuesday that the best way to make Iran cease was for the US to guarantee it would not seek regime change.
An Iranian judge who sentenced several reformist dissidents to jail, including hunger-striking reporter Akbar Ganji, was shot dead by a lone gunman riding a motorcycle, a spokesperson said on Tuesday. ”Hassan Moghaddas was shot and martyred after leaving the court building,” Jamal Karimirad told Reuters. – Guardian Unlimited Â