Washington - After a three-week pause to pursue an incentives package in the Iran nuclear crisis, the United States is reviving its push for a stalled resolution in the United Nations Security Council, UN Ambassador John Bolton said Thursday.
In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bolton said he would 'start working again' on the Chapter 7 resolution as soon as he returned to New York from Capitol Hill.
Differences among the five veto-wielding Security Council members have led to a diplomatic deadlock over the level of punishment the regime in Tehran should face if it continues to defy the United Nations and enrich uranium.
Russia and China will not accept any implicit threat of the use of force against Iran contained in Chapter 7. Britain, France and the United States want the resolution to go forward in the hope it will convince Iran to stand down.
The Bush administration is under pressure from former US secretaries of state, including Madeleine Albright, and the Iranian government to hold bilateral talks with Tehran on the standoff.
A long letter to US President George Bush from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last week - the first direct effort to contact Washington in 25 years - was seen as a quest for direct dialogue.
But the White House said this week that such talks would not take place until Iran scraps its fledgling enrichment programme, first announced last month, in exchange for economic incentives.
In London on Wednesday, high-ranking representatives from France, Britain, Germany presented their proposals to Russia, China and the US that they hope would convince Iran to give up enrichment and accept help with building light water reactors to avoid production of weapons-grade uranium.
Tehran has already rejected the latest incentives, even before they were formally presented, including cooperation over building the light water reactor and guaranteed nuclear fuel delivery.
Iranian diplomats have been cultivating their counterparts in the US for a direct US-Iran dialogue. US Senator Christopher Dodd said Thursday that he had lunch with Iran's Ambassador to the UN, Javad Zarif, recently.
Bolton told the committee he was not authorized to hold such conversations with Iranian diplomats.
Bolton said he would resume pushing for the Security Council action because the track 'needs to move forward as well' while the 'incentives and disincentives package proceeds on another track as well.'
'It's actually a very active moment in a variety of diplomatic channels on the Iran front,' Bolton told the panel.
A report in London this week indicated that Iran could be able to produce between 20 and 25 kilos of highly-enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon by 2010. The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) stressed that the limited access of the Vienna-based UN nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, to Iran's facilities required policymakers 'to rely on worst-case assumptions about Iran's progress toward the bomb.'
