Iran said on Tuesday it was not interested in "condescending" security guarantees from the United States, rejecting an idea which the UN's atomic watchdog chief hopes could ease tensions over the Islamic republic's nuclear drive.
"Iran does not need these kind of condescending guarantees and has a good enough capacity to defend itself," Iran's top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani was quoted as saying by the student news agency ISNA.
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, urged Washington on Monday to put security assurances on the table with Iran as it had done in similar talks with North Korea.
Speaking after being handed the Nobel Peace Prize, ElBaradei said such a step could bring a breakthrough in efforts to persuade Iran to limit its nuclear fuel activities, seen by the West as a weapons drive. Tehran says its programme is purely for peaceful purposes.
Larijani, the hard-line secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, argued that the West needed to realise that Iran was not the problem in the region.
"Iran is surrounded by countries like Israel which have the atomic bomb, and we just want that to be understood," he was quoted as saying.
Government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham also told reporters that any talks with the Americans - with whom diplomatic relations were cut a quarter of a century ago - were "not on the agenda".
Washington has also already rejected the idea of offering incentives to a country it has lumped into an "axis of evil".
US Deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said all dealings with Tehran should focus on "a consistent and established pattern of Iranian misbehaviour and Iranian violation of its commitments and Iranian deception."
"And before anybody asks the United States to do something, it's up to Iran to answer the questions, act like a responsible member of the international community, and stop violating its agreements," he said.
Analysts and many diplomats have suggested that security guarantees and incentives could be crucial to Iran with thousands of American troops operating in two of its neighbours, Iraq in the west and Afghanistan in the east.
"I am not convinced that the EU has offered sufficiently interesting things to the Iranians," Hans Blix, a former IAEA head and chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq, told AFP last week.
The Europeans, he said, "are also restrained by the backseat driver whom they have in the car, the Americans."
The United States has said it was willing to provide written security assurances to North Korea to further six-party talks aimed at controlling Pyongyang's much-more-advanced nuclear programme.
But Iran has already rejected an offer of trade and other incentives from Britain, France and Germany - sticking by what it insists is a "right" to conduct fuel cycle work including the enrichment of uranium.
Enriched uranium can be fuel for civilian nuclear power reactors but also the raw material for atom bombs.
The IAEA has still not ruled, after an almost three-year investigation, on whether Iran's nuclear programme is peaceful.
The EU, backed by the United States, wants Iran to permanently give up enrichment work as an "objective guarantee" that it will not acquire weapons.
But with incentives off the table, the EU-3 are now pinning their hopes for a compromise under which Iran's enrichment work would be carried out in Russia, although this has also been rejected by Tehran.