Iran Warns Against Referral to Security Council

Nasser Karimi, Chicago Sun Times:

Iran said Sunday that it has no plans to resume uranium enrichment soon but warned that it might change its mind if the International Atomic Energy Agency asks the U.N. Security Council to consider sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

The 35-nation board of the U.N. watchdog agency meets today in Vienna, Austria, to start discussing Iran's nuclear program.

The European Union and United States insist Iran halt a uranium conversion process restarted last month or face an effort to have U.N. punitive sanctions imposed.

U.S. builds its case

Conversion is a precursor step to uranium enrichment, which produces material that can be used as fuel for nuclear reactors to generate electricity but also as the core of nuclear weapons.

''Enrichment is not on the agenda for the time being, but if the IAEA meeting leads to radical results, we will make our decision to correspond to that,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said.

''In a radical atmosphere, there is the possibility of any decision'' by Iran's leaders, he added, without elaborating. READ MORE

The United States accuses Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons. Iran says its program is intended only to produce electricity and insists it won't accept any limits on its right under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to have a peaceful atomic energy program.

The United States and European nations whose diplomatic advances were rebuffed worked Sunday to present a case against the Tehran regime to the nuclear watchdog agency.

The Bush administration's lead diplomat on Iran, Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, huddled with representatives of Germany, France and Britain a day after Iran's new hard-line president used a United Nations speech to proclaim his country's ''inalienable right'' to produce nuclear fuel.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, addressing the General Assembly, defiantly rejected the European offer of economic incentives in exchange for Iran giving up its uranium enrichment program.

Ahmadinejad denied his nation had any intention of producing nuclear weapons. To prove that, he offered foreign countries and companies a role in Iran's nuclear energy production.