EU Hoping to Restart Iran Nuclear Negotiations

Daniel Dombey in Brussels and Gareth Smyth in Tehran, The Financial Times:

The European Union is considering restarting talks with Tehran over Iran's nuclear programme, a move that could lead to tensions with the US. Washington would like its allies to take a tougher line on the issue, in particular in referring the issue to the United Nations Security Council.

Senior diplomats from the "EU3" countries that led negotiations with Tehran - Britain, France and Germany - met this week to discuss resuming the talks, which broke down in August. READ MORE

Tony Blair, UK prime minister, has since criticised Iran for allegedly "interfering" in Iraq, adding that the UK would not be "intimidated" in the nuclear negotiations. But European diplomats still hope to restart talks.

On Thursday IRNA, Iran's official news agency, quoted "an official close to the country's negotiation team" as saying that talks could restart "in the near future". It gave no details.

The talks broke down when Iran rejected an EU offer in August and resumed uranium conversion, a preliminary stage in the nuclear fuel cycle it had agreed to suspend as part of its agreement with the EU3.

While Iran insists its intentions are purely peaceful, the EU and the US suspect it of seeking to develop nuclear weapons. "Of course we would like a negotiated solution to this problem but it has to be under the terms of the agreement," said a EU3 diplomat.

But the EU3 meeting this week, which was also attended by diplomats from Spain and Italy, was intended as a "brainstorm" on ways of restarting the talks despite the Iranians' decision to begin conversion.

Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nation's nuclear watchdog, and the winner of this year's Nobel peace prize, has pushed the EU to resume the talks on a technical level. He is thought to consider conversion a secondary issue compared with uranium enrichment, a process that can produce weapons grade material.

Because of its successive deals with the EU3, Tehran has not carried out uranium enrichment for the past two years. "With Iran, we are having a hiccup right now," Mr ElBaradei said this week. "I have optimism that in the next month or so we will see some resumption of negotiations."

Time is running out, however, since the IAEA board is set to decide in late November whether to refer Tehran to the Security Council after having found Iran in "non-compliance" with its international obligations last month. Iran has threatened that any such move would lead it to resume enrichment, a threat that worries some EU diplomats.

"If we go to New York we need a strategy. If not it could affect the credibility of the UN," said one. "But for dialogue with the Iranians, the positions of both sides need to be consolidated."

Indeed, the problem Europe faces in trying to revive negotiations is finding an effective interlocutor.

Tehran's nuclear negotiation team was changed after the fundamentalist president Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad took over in August, with Ali Larijani, the new top security official, sticking to Iran's existing positions.