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Wednesday, May 4, 2005

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  It hasn't dimmed the rhetoric on the open floor, where the Americans on Monday demanded that Iran dismantle advanced technology that could help build nuclear bombs, and the Iranians on Tuesday countered that they'll cling to treaty rights and the technology - but they're "eager" to negotiate, too.

Behind the scenes, however, for months leading up to the May 2-27 conference, disputes over what it would cover had paralyzed preparations, leaving diplomats to convene on Monday without a complete agenda.

It was enough to lead the conference president, Sergio de Queiroz Duarte, to appeal for governments to show "genuine cooperation, wisdom and enlightened statesmanship."

The Brazilian ambassador's exhortation, and his telephone shuttle diplomacy, seemed to be working by late Tuesday. "We're almost there," an official close to the talks said privately.

For months, the Americans had objected to the proposed agenda's focus on commitments made by nuclear weapons states at the last twice-a-decade conference, in 2000, to take specific steps toward disarmament, such as activating the nuclear test-ban treaty. The Bush administration's steps, in some cases, have been backward; it has rejected that treaty, for example.

Compromise language evidently was found in that area, but in the end the Iranians balked at a focus on "developments" relevant to treaty implementation - understood by all as diplomatic code for Iran's current flirtation with potential nuclear-bomb technology. The final hours of wordplay dealt with this issue.

The agenda becomes important next week, when committees take up the brass-tacks work of debating and drafting conference positions on such sensitive issues.

Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, needed no agenda to go to the heart of the issue in an address Tuesday, telling delegates his country is "determined to pursue all legal areas of nuclear technology, including enrichment, exclusively for peaceful purposes."

In the enrichment process, uranium gas is passed through centrifuges to produce either fuel for nuclear power or, with further enrichment, the stuff of atom bombs. Washington contends Iran's long-secret program is meant for weapons-making, a charge Tehran denies.

Tehran has been negotiating with Germany, France and Britain about suspending its enrichment operations in return for economic incentives. Kharrazi said Tuesday his government "has been eager to offer assurances and guarantees that (Iran's nuclear plans) remain permanently peaceful."

But "no one should be under the illusion," he said, that such guarantees will include an end to "legal activity" under the nonproliferation treaty, which says member states have a right to develop civilian nuclear energy.

Last week's round of talks with the Europeans ended without agreement, and an Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman said Tuesday in Tehran that "some nuclear activities," suspended during the negotiations, would resume at an undetermined date - apparently work on producing uranium hexafluoride, the gas feedstock for enrichment centrifuges.

Operating the centrifuges themselves "will remain the last option," said spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi.

President Bush has proposed an outright ban on such dual-use nuclear technology, except in the United States and a dozen other countries that already have it. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the U.N. nuclear agency, instead proposes putting nuclear fuel production under multilateral control by regional or international bodies.

Later Tuesday in Washington, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that despite the Iranian moves the United States remains committed to the European-led effort to ensure Iran doesn't build a bomb.

"We continue to believe this is the only way for Iran to resolve this issue in a way that the international community will be able to verify and to support, so we very much hope that the talks are going to be successful," Rice said.

© 2005 The Associated Press

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