13 December 2009: Wall St Journal
Elizabeth Williamson reports on Iran.
Obama administration officials weren’t impressed by Iran’s weekend offer to trade its uranium in small batches, saying the offer wasn’t sufficient to head off possible new sanctions.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki on Saturday said Iran was prepared to exchange 400 kilograms (882 pounds) of uranium for an equivalent amount of enriched uranium. That was one-third the amount that it had agreed to swap under a proposed deal hammered out with U.S., French, Russian and International Atomic Energy Agency negotiators earlier this year.
That deal called for Iran to ship out the bulk of its low-enriched uranium, to be further enriched outside the country and then shipped back to Iran for use in a medical-research reactor. Mottaki told Iranian news agencies that Iran would exchange the remainder over several years.
U.S. officials on Sunday said Mr. Mottaki’s comments wouldn’t alter the Obama administration’s plan to begin imposing new economic sanctions on Iran by year-end.
Washington proposed the nuclear fuel-swap plan in October with the aim of preventing Iran from building an atomic weapon in the short-term. The U.S. had also hoped that Tehran’s agreement to the plan would show its commitment to working with the international community to ensure that its nuclear program was peaceful.
U.S. officials on Sunday said Mr. Mottaki’s proposal wouldn’t achieve either goal. “Nothing’s changed in our calculation,” said State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley. A senior White House official said in a statement that the offer “does not appear to be consistent with the fair and balanced draft agreement proposed by the IAEA.”
The U.S. and its allies have scheduled further talks in coming days to discuss imposing possible sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program.
