Washington – Just 48 hours before representatives of 189 nations meet at the United Nations to review the flaws in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Iran threatened Saturday to resume producing nuclear fuel.
The conference that begins Monday was meant to offer hope of closing huge loopholes in the treaty, which the United States says Iran and North Korea are exploiting to build nuclear weapons.
Instead, the session appears deadlocked even before it begins, according to senior American officials and diplomats preparing for it in New York.
Already virtually dead, the officials say, is a proposal by Dr. Mohamed El Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, that would impose a five-year moratorium on all new enrichment of uranium and reprocessing of plutonium. Those activities are the two main paths to a nuclear weapon. But the U.S., Japan and France oppose the moratorium, as does Iran.
Iran, a signatory, declared Saturday that negotiations with the European Union over the future of its nuclear program had made so little progress that it might end its voluntary halt on enriching uranium, which the U.S. believes will be diverted for use in weapons.
Hassan Rowhani, the top Iranian negotiator, said that this week the country’s leadership would make “a definitive decision on whether or not to resume uranium enrichment.”
“The Iran situation has turned very serious in the past few days,” a senior European diplomat said Saturday. “We think they are about to start up again.”