Tehran – A day before major negotiations were to resume in London over Iran’s nuclear program, the foreign minister increased the pressure for a quick deal, warning that his country would resume uranium enrichment if there was no progress today in the talks.
“If talks with European Union are not successful tomorrow, negotiations will collapse and we will have no choice but to restart the uranium enrichment program,” Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said Thursday after a meeting with his Dutch counterpart in The Hague.
He said Iran was not willing to accept what he called “delay tactics” by the Europeans, and he reiterated Iran’s position that his country had a right to nuclear technology.
Iran has signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which allows nations to produce nuclear fuel for energy production but not for weapons, which require a higher level of enrichment.
Iran has said its nuclear intentions are peaceful but has admitted it hid major elements of its nuclear program. As a result, the U.S. and Europe want it to renounce all uranium enrichment, in order to guarantee that it is not secretly preparing to make weapons-grade fuel.
Britain, Germany and France have been negotiating with Iran since 2003 to reach a deal, and Iran agreed last fall to freeze its enrichment program but not to end it permanently.
A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry said last week that Iran planned to resume enrichment activities, regardless of what came out of the talks, within a matter of months.
Iran recently offered to give the European countries “objective guarantees” that its program was for peaceful purposes. An adviser to former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, chairman of the Expediency Council, said the offer was to suspend its overall enrichment program if Iran could keep a small experimental program running.