“This proposal is no longer on the table,” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in an interview published Tuesday by respected French daily Le Monde.
“But if others formulated it again, we would study it under one condition: that the Iranian people’s right to enrich uranium be preserved,” the Iranian leader said.
He first made the consortium proposal at the U.N. General Assembly. He said then that Iran “is prepared to engage in serious partnership with private and public sectors of other countries in the implementation of uranium enrichment programs in Iran.”
To Le Monde, Ahmadinejad noted that the United States and European nations had not favored his proposal.
“They thought we formulated it only because we were in a position of weakness,” he said.
Europe and the U.S. want Iran to suspend all enrichment work inside the country out of fear that Tehran could use the technology to produce weapons.
