Paris/Islamabad/Tehran - The United States and France said Friday they wanted clarity about Iran's stance on a deal to reduce the Islamic Republic's stockpile of enriched uranium. US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told broadcaster CNN that the aim was to find out whether Iran's response was an initial answer, or a final stance.
Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), issued an first response to the Vienna-based agency Thursday, and told Iranian media his country was seeking changes to the scheme.
The IAEA plan envisages sending most of Iran's enriched uranium stock to Russia and France and making it into fuel for a medical-use reactor in Tehran.
"I am going to let this process play out, but clearly we are working to determine exactly what they are willing to do," Clinton said during a trip to Pakistan.
The French government wants an "immediate official response" from Iran on the proposal, Foreign Ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said in Paris.
The US, Russia and France last week agreed to the 4-country deal that would build trust in Iran's assertion that it needs enriched uranium for reactors, not for nuclear weapons.
IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei, who is currently in the US, has been trying to get clarifications from Iran, Western diplomats told the German Press Agency dpa. The US, Russia and France wanted to hear from him whether there was room for further negotiations, the diplomats said.
Officials, as well as Iranian and US media suggested that Iran does not agree to a central elements of the plan, namely to ship out the enriched uranium in one go, and to wait for around a year until it is processed into reactor fuel.
This scheme would open a time window for Iran to hold wider-ranging talks with Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the US on improving relations with Tehran and on its nuclear programme.
An unnamed Iranian official told news agency IRNA that Iran wants more detailed discussions about the deal before giving a final reply, and about possibilities such as obtaining the nuclear fuel in simultaneous exchange for its own low-enriched uranium.
Western officials and media reports suggested that Iran was also proposing to ship out its nuclear material in installments, rather than in one batch.
Iranian experts and parliamentarians argue that simply buying the uranium fuel abroad would be cheaper than agreeing to the international deal. But Western experts say that some political factions in Tehran begrudge President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the opportunity to make this deal with the US.
European Union leaders also called on Iran to agree to the nuclear plan, and said in a declaration at their Brussels summit meeting that the country should "rebuild confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran's nuclear programme."
