Iran said on Monday it could endorse a UN deal for it to send potential nuclear fuel abroad for processing, contradicting lawmakers who rejected the plan sought by world powers as a trap. The remark by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was the most positive yet from a senior Iranian official and hinted at fierce backroom debate between hard-liners and moderates in the faction-ridden Iranian leadership on whether to accept the deal.
France's Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said it was urgent for world powers to make a deal with Tehran to avert an Israeli strike. "They (Israel) will not tolerate an Iranian bomb. We know that, all of us. So that is an additional risk and that is why we must decrease the tension and solve the problem. Hopefully we are going to stop this race to a confrontation," Kouchner said.
"There is the time that Israel will offer us before reacting, because Israel will react as soon as they know clearly that there is a threat," he added in an interview published by British newspaper The Daily Telegraph. In Iran, UN inspectors were examining a hitherto secret uranium enrichment site bunkered inside a mountain to verify Tehran's stance that the plant was meant to make only low-enriched fuel for electricity, not the high-purity version for nuclear arms.
Understandings on the fuel plan and outside access to the enrichment plant under construction were struck at high-level Geneva talks between Iran and six world powers on October 1. They see the deals as litmus tests of Iran's stated intent to use enriched uranium only for peaceful ends, and a basis for more ambitious negotiations on curbing enrichment in Iran to defuse a crisis over its disputed nuclear aspirations.
Mottaki said Iran could either send part of its low-enriched uranium (LEU) stockpile abroad for specialised processing into fuel for a Tehran nuclear medicine facility that is running out of it, or buy the material from foreign suppliers. "In order to obtain this fuel, we might spend money as in the past or we might present part of the fuel that we have right now, and currently do not need, for further processing," he was quoted by the official news agency IRNA as saying.
He said the Islamic Republic would announce its decision "in the next few days". Iran missed a Friday deadline set by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief for giving a reply to the proposal he hammered out in consultations with Iran, Russia, France and the United States in Vienna last week. Prominent lawmakers have said since then that Iran should not send out any of its LEU reserve, suggesting it was a strategic asset Tehran could not afford to relinquish while facing Western pressure to shelve enrichment entirely.