C O L U M N S

VIENNA, Nov 9: The United States wants to give Iran “some space” in negotiations on a key deal on the supply of fuel for a nuclear reactor, amid signs Tehran is set to reject it, a top US official said here on Monday.

“We are in extra innings on these negotiations,” Washington’s envoy to the IAEA, Glyn Davies, told reporters here as it began to look increasingly likely that the Islamic republic would spurn the deal.

“We want to give Iran some space. It’s a tough decision,” Davies said when asked about the state of talks between the US, France, Russia and Iran on an IAEA proposal for guaranteeing the supply of enriched uranium to a research reactor in Tehran, which makes radio-isotopes for medical purposes.

Under the plans, thrashed out last month under the auspices of IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, Iran will ship out most of its known low-enriched uranium — about 1,200kgs — to Russia for further enrichment.

The material will then be turned into fuel by France and sent back to Iran, in a bid to prevent Tehran further enriching the uranium itself in a suspected drive to develop nuclear weapons.

But on Saturday, in what appeared to be a serious setback for efforts to allay western concerns about Iran’s atomic ambitions.

“We do not want to give part of our 1,200 kilos of enriched uranium in order to receive fuel of 20 per cent enrichment,” said Alaeddin Borujerdi, the influential head of parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee.

“This option of giving our enriched uranium gradually or in one go is over now,” he told the ISNA news agency.

“We are studying how to procure fuel and (Ali Asghar) Soltanieh is negotiating to find a solution,” he added, referring to Iran’s envoy to the UN nuclear watchdog.

According to a report in the New York Times on Monday, the Iranians are unwilling to ship out their uranium, proposing instead that the IAEA take custody of it, but keep it on Kish, a Gulf resort island that is part of Iran.

That is unacceptable for the West, because leaving the nuclear material on Iranian territory meant that the Iranians could evict the international inspectors at any moment, the newspaper said.

That happened in North Korea in 2003, and within months that country had converted its fuel into the material for several nuclear weapons, The Times said.

The New York Times reported that Washington had told Iran it is willing to allow the country to send its stockpile of enriched uranium to any of several nations, including Turkey, for safekeeping.—AFP