VIENNA, 28 April 2005 — Iran is ratcheting up the pressure on EU giants France, Britain and Germany to accept its plan to join the world’s nuclear club, European diplomats said yesterday. Sharing Washington’s suspicions that Iran is trying to develop the capability to produce atomic weapons, the European Union has demanded that Iran give up its nuclear fuel program in exchange for economic and political incentives.

Iran, which insists its nuclear ambitions are limited to the peaceful generation of electricity, says uranium enrichment is a sovereign right it will never renounce.

Four months of talks have not changed Tehran’s position. Iran has taken the offensive in the talks, diplomats said. “We are on the defensive now,” a diplomat from one of the EU trio countries said about the next round of talks in London on Friday. “We are no longer talking about cessation (of uranium enrichment) but exclusively about the Iranian proposal.”

He said there would be no breakthroughs at tomorrow’s meeting though it might result in a flood of angry rhetoric from Iran, which would not get any definite response from the Europeans. Tehran has proposed that it build up its uranium enrichment program in stages, beginning with a small scale enrichment plant at Natanz in central Iran outfitted with 3,000 centrifuges — machines that purify uranium for use as fuel for power plants or weapons by spinning at supersonic speeds.

The project would be closely monitored by the UN nuclear watchdog and would be expanded until the underground facility became a commercial-scale enrichment plant with around 54,000 centrifuges, diplomats familiar with the Iranian proposal said.

Meanwhile, a journalist from the southwestern Iranian city of Khuzestan, the scene of recent unrest, has been arrested over his comments on the violence, the press rights group Reporters without Borders said yesterday. The Paris-based group said Yosef Azizi Banitrouf, an ethnic Arab, was arrested in a raid on his home on Monday. “We strongly deplore the arrest of Banitrouf, who was simply expressing his personal opinion in articles and in interviews given to other newspapers,” said Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Borders — RSF).

“As soon as a journalist speaks out in Iran, the authorities crack down, either by closing the paper concerned or throwing the journalist in prison.