LONDON, August 12 (AFP) - After calling on Iran to halt nuclear fuel work, the international community is now waiting to see if Tehran will give up uranium conversion that has fanned fears of a weapons program before a deadline next month.
"It is now what they do that counts," French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy said in Paris Friday, adding that the European Union is ready to continue nuclear talks with Iran provided they suspend all fuel cycle activities, AFP reported.
But former Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani said Iran's decision to resume sensitive nuclear work was "irreversible."
During a Friday sermon in Tehran, the prominent ayatollah warned that Western opposition to Iran's program will "cost them dearly," signaling the possibility of a hardened stance.
But non-proliferation expert Gary Samore said the Iranians would still try to deal.
"I assume the Iranians will try before September 3 to cut a new deal with the Europeans, but I think the Europeans have made up their minds and are not prepared to back down," said Samore, director of studies at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies.
He said Iran would seek to win approval for the first stage of making enriched uranium, which can be fuel for nuclear power reactors but also the raw material for atomic bombs.
The International Atomic Energy Agency on Thursday in Vienna passed a EU resolution expressing "serious concern" at Iran's resumption of uranium conversion activities, and set a September 3 date for an IAEA report on Iran's compliance.
Iran's failure to stop the work, which it had suspended in November but resumed this week, could lead to the IAEA bringing Iran before the UN Security Council for sanctions.
Diplomats in Vienna close to the IAEA said that EU negotiators Britain, France and Germany, which have since December been trying to get Iran to give up nuclear fuel work in return for trade and other benefits, feel betrayed by Tehran's decision to resume the work and reject the package of incentive offers.
A Foreign Office spokesman in London told AFP that "Iran has violated" its agreement to maintain the fuel suspension while negotiations continue with the European trio.
Samore said the Iranians may stick to their hard line, because they are in a stronger position than when they agreed to the suspension last year. The world cannot cut Iranian oil exports at a time of rocketing prices for crude,and the United States is bogged down militarily in Iraq and cannot risk another such confrontation.
He said the Iranians also "need to work out bugs in their conversion process," since they are apparently having problems with removing contaminants in the first stages of converting uranium yellowcake ore into the gas that is the feedstock for enriching uranium into reactor fuel.
A non-Western diplomat who follows the Iranian nuclear program told AFP that "when talks first began with the Europeans, the Iranians agreed to suspend conversion in a move that coincided with the need to resolve problems in the conversion process.
"During the suspension period, there was massive activity to fix the failures," the diplomat said, noting that now Iran was ready to run its machines.
"It is not likely that they will encounter major hitches after their considerable effort to upgrade the systems," the diplomat said.
He added that Iranian tactics in two years of talks with the IAEA and the Europeans have been to hold off on nuclear work when they don't need to do it and then force a crisis when they need to run specific machines.
George Perkovich, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the Iranians may have provoked this crisis "to see if the US will come in and back up the European guarantees" of a nuclear fuel supply and security guarantees, which he said would be "meaningless" without US support.
