TEHRAN, 21 September 2005 — Iran yesterday issued its toughest warning yet in response to Western pressure over its nuclear program, threatening to limit UN inspections, resume ultra-sensitive fuel work and saying it could even be forced to quit the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The country’s top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, also said Tehran would base its business dealings with individual countries — especially in the oil sector — on whose side they took in the dispute.

He was speaking as Britain, France and Germany lobbied members of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to haul Iran before the UN Security Council over “breaches” of international atomic safeguards.

“If you want to use the language of force, Iran will be left with no choice, in order to preserve its technical achievements, to get out of the framework of the NPT and out of the framework of the additional protocol, and resume enrichment,” Larijani warned in a news conference. He later elaborated: “If our dossier is sent to the Security Council, we will cease the application of the additional protocol” — a clause that gives reinforced inspection powers to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

“Concerning the NPT, it depends how they will send our case to the Security Council,” he said, without elaborating on what precisely could trigger Iran to abandon the cornerstone of the UN’s fight against the spread of nuclear arms.

Speaking to AFP, national security spokesman Ali Agha Mohammadi only said that leaving the NPT altogether was “part of the scenarios we have examined.”

“By giving this press conference we wanted to tell the Europeans that they... should not make a strategic error,” he said.

Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only, and argues that it merely wants to access atomic energy technology as a signatory of the NPT. Nuclear bombs, it asserts, are “un-Islamic.”

But enrichment technology can be diverted to produce nuclear weapons, and the country is under mounting US and EU pressure to abandon fuel cycle work altogether.

Larijani also warned that states which lined up with the Europeans and US against Iran would suffer consequences when it came to their involvement with Iran’s oil sector.