Europe "Rock-Solid" That Iran Cease Enrichment

AFP, Yahoo! News:

European diplomats say the EU is "rock-solid" in its insistence that Iran cease uranium enrichment, ahead of crucial talks next week designed to win guarantees from Tehran that it will not make nuclear weapons.

European Union negotiators Britain, France and Germany are studying an Iranian proposal that would allow some enrichment, and there have been hints of a crack in their unity over this issue. READ MORE

But the European trio is "rock-solid on cessation" by Iran of uranium enrichment, which makes fuel for nuclear reactors but what can also be the explosive core of atom bombs, one European diplomat told AFP on Thursday.

The trio is to meet with Iran starting Tuesday in Geneva in a nuclear issues working group, ahead of a meeting of senior foreign ministry officials from the two sides scheduled for April 29 in London, diplomats said.

Iran proposed at such a senior-level meeting in Paris in March a project to do low-scale enrichment in a pilot project, and the Europeans agreed to consider this.

The European diplomat said however that the EU position remains that "cessation means cessation."

The EU wants so-called "objective guarantees" from Tehran that its nuclear program is a peaceful one.

Iran is trying to soften this demand, and some European diplomats told AFP that French President Jacques Chirac had said in February at a meeting in Paris with Iranian President Mohamad Khatami that France would agree to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) determining what these objective guarantees would be.

Other diplomats said this was not the case and that Chirac had only said that the Vienna-based UN nuclear watchdog would have a role to play.

The IAEA is a verification arm of the United Nations rather than a policy-making body.

A non-European diplomat said Iran felt it could get a better deal from the IAEA than it would get from the Europeans, who agree with the United States that Iran should not be allowed to develop the capacity to make nuclear weapons.

One European diplomat said that the idea of having the IAEA determine the objective

The EU3 need to be applauded if they stick to this position. We reported back in November that the likely reason Iran wants to maintain a small number of centrifuges to continue to run, was to hide an undeclared enrichment program.

John Loftus (a Fox News intelligence correspondent and director of IntelCon) claimed that uranium enrichment centrifuges, which run at supersonic speeds, emit a unique “sound” that our intelligence satellites can detect. He believes that Iran is aware of this capability of US intelligence.

If Iran has an “undeclared” centrifuge program as many claim, then Iran needs a few centrifuges to be permitted to stay in operation to mask this larger program they have in operation. Once Iran declares that all enrichment has ceased US intelligence would be “hear” the undeclared centrifuges and thus be able to prove their deception. This would explain the Iranian insistence on running the empty centrifuges it convinced the EU3 to permit to continue to run.