Iran still plans reply to atomic incentives deal

Tehran, Aug 7: Iran still plans to reply by August 22 to a big power offer of incentives to stop making nuclear fuel, an official said today, but more senior politicians have already rejected the terms of the package.

The United States, Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia proposed two months ago to give Iran trade and technical concessions if it shelves an uranium enrichment programme first.

But Iran was deemed to take too long to respond and was referred to the UN Security Council. The world body promptly passed a resolution ordering Tehran to halt atomic work or face the possible threat of sanctions.

Tehran's Foreign Ministry said this resolution would automatically kill off the package of incentives. But government spokesman Gholamhossein Elham said Tehran would still respond.

''We are still ready to answer the proposed package in the time frame we gave, and we will answer,'' he was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency.

There are no signs, however, that Iran would engage the offer and allay Western suspicions it seeks to build atom bombs. Iran says it needs atomic fuel solely to run power stations.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani have said Iran will continue to produce nuclear fuel regardless of international calls for it to stop. Larijani even says Iran will expand uranium enrichment.

A Western intelligence official in Europe said Iran was delaying a definitive reply to the offer while it sought to master the technology of running several cascades of interconnected centrifuge enrichment machines at the same time.

Tehran's aim was to put new ''facts on the ground'' that would strengthen its bargaining power with the West, said the official, who spoke on condition he was not further identified.

''Iran has assessed their goal will not be reached before late August and may even go into September. So its choice of late August for responding to the incentives is not accidental,'' the official said.

Iran enriched uranium to the minimum 3.5 per cent level required for power plant fuel for the first time in April, using a pilot cascade of 164 centrifuges at its Natanz plant.

Tehran later told the watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency it had launched a new round of enrichment on June 6.

But diplomats familiar with IAEA monitoring said Iran appears to have focused on test-spinning of centrifuges since then and done little feeding of uranium into the machines.

''There has been no acceleration of the programme contrary to announcements. They are testing centrifuge durability to build confidence that they can run these things over a longer period without crashes like they had before,'' a senior diplomat said.

Reuters

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