VIENNA, 5 April 2005 — Iran still hopes to strike a deal with the European Union on its peaceful use of nuclear energy, one that will assuage fears that it is trying to develop atomic weapons, President Mohammad Khatami said yesterday.
Khatami said on a visit to Vienna that the two sides were working “to find a solution to the right of our land for the peaceful development of nuclear energy and also to overcome the worries of our European colleagues” about Tehran’s nuclear program.
Iran has been negotiating since December with Britain, France and Germany to win trade, security and technology rewards in return for giving guarantees that it is not trying to develop nuclear weapons.
The talks are deadlocked over Tehran’s refusal to abandon uranium enrichment, the key process that makes fuel for civilian reactors but also what can be the explosive core of atom bombs.
The EU is currently considering, ahead of a meeting next week with Iranian negotiators in Geneva, a proposal by Tehran to allow it to produce enriched uranium on a small scale.
Iran made the written proposal to be allowed to run a pilot centrifuge enrichment project at a meeting in Paris in March with the three EU negotiating states.
But European diplomats say their position is still that Iran must abandon all enrichment activities.
A Western diplomat told AFP that the United States will only back the EU initiative, as it currently does, if Europe maintains its demand for a permanent cessation of enrichment.
Otherwise, Washington will seek to take Iran before the UN Security Council, where it could face possible economic and other sanctions. Khatami told reporters after meeting with Austrian President Heinz Fischer that he hoped Austria could help Iran in the talks due to its important role within the EU.
The Iranian president said his country opposed, as other nations do, “the gross misuse of this (nuclear) technology, which is (the development of) fearsome atomic weapons.”
But he said that even oil-rich Iran needs peaceful nuclear technology. Oil is an important resource and Iran must protect what it has “for our future generations,” he said.
