Hassan Rowhani, head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said Iran would walk away from the negotiations with Britain, France and Germany if no “tangible progress” was made soon.
Sharing Washington’s suspicions that Iran may be planning to develop nuclear arms, the EU trio has offered Iran political and economic incentives to scrap its uranium enrichment programme, which can produce reactor fuel but could also give Tehran the capability to make bomb-grade material.
Rowhani gave no specific details of Iran’s proposed compromise, but diplomats have told Reuters Tehran wants to run a small plant for enriching uranium and keep the door open to fitting it with tens of thousands of centrifuges to produce enriched-uranium fuel on an industrial scale.
“The Europeans should tell us whether these ideas can work as the basis for continued negotiations or not,” Rowhani told Britain’s Financial Times newspaper in an interview.
“If yes, fine. If not, then the negotiations cannot continue. These ideas are the very last possible ideas that we could come up with as compromise options.”
Iran says its nuclear programme is for generating electricity only and denies it has any ambitions to build an atomic bomb.
Two days of EU-Iran nuclear working group talks began in Geneva on Tuesday and are due to continue at a more senior level in London on April 29.
“If we see tangible progress, we are willing to continue,” Rowhani said in a transcript of the interview carried on the newspaper’s Web site (http://www.ft.com).
“We have informed the Europeans of the nature of the progress we must have by April 29. We have put a number of very clear ideas on the table. The ball is now in the European court.”
The U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been investigating Iran’s nuclear programme for nearly three years.
