/ 14 February 2006

Tehran threatens to abandon nuclear treaty

Iran started testing its nuclear fuel equipment on Monday, called off talks with Russia on a compromise in its nuclear dispute with the West and threatened to abandon the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The barrage of defiant signals suggested that the increasingly hard-line regime in Tehran was gambling on confrontation with the West, confident that a divided international community would blink first.

United Nations inspectors were to travel to the main uranium enrichment complex at Natanz, south of Tehran, on Tuesday to monitor the situation there. Diplomats said on Monday that Iran had started several gas centrifuge machines at Natanz, feeding in uranium hexafluoride gas, which is spun to produce enriched uranium for power plants or fissile material for nuclear warheads.

Iranian news agencies also said that UN cameras, seals and surveillance gear were being removed from the mothballed equipment at Natanz. Hundreds of the machines are needed to obtain enough material for a bomb. The Iranians, who recently announced that they were restarting operations at Natanz that were frozen more than two years ago, were believed to be using only a few machines.

The Iranians also abruptly called off talks scheduled for Thursday in Moscow aimed at shifting the Natanz enrichment operations to Russia. While the Iranians issued mixed signals about the Russian overture, UN officials and diplomats said they believed the initiative was dead. It had been seen as offering the best opportunity for all sides to save face.

But the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, insisted at the weekend that Iran would not forfeit its entitlement and capacity to enrich uranium on its own soil, a position repeated on Monday by his spokesperson.

The spokesperson also warned that Iran could withdraw from the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty, emulating North Korea’s move three years ago. Ahmadinejad issued the same warning at the weekend, the first such threat since the nuclear dispute surfaced three years ago.

The Iranian actions came in response to the United States-led move at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) 10 days ago to have Iran reported to the UN Security Council, which can penalise Iran for its perceived nuclear recalcitrance.

The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, warned that Iran would find itself isolated if it turned its back on the treaty. ”There is a robust international response … to say to the Iranians, yes, you can have peaceful nuclear power, but you cannot have technologies that might lead to a nuclear weapon,” she said.

Any Security Council action has been deferred until after Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA chief, delivers a detailed report on the UN inspections in Iran. — Guardian Unlimited Â