Iran hopes to build more nuclear power plants; US hints Iran is now contained
Iran-Russia, Politics, 3/26/2005

Iran hopes to build more nuclear power plants for electricity needs said Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi on Friday, IRNA reported.

Kharrazi urged the European parties in the ongoing negotiations "to prove their seriousness in the talks so as to reach concrete results for extension of the objective guarantees," IRNA said.

IRNA added "Appreciating Iranian and non-Iranian technicians as well as the management of the project for Bushehr nuclear power plant, Kharrazi said that would be the first step to use nuclear energy for meeting domestic electricity shortage... the power plant would raise the Islamic Republic's technical and technological potential to benefit from the nuclear energy for peaceful purposes."

Kharrazi expressed hope that the Russian side would commission and deliver the plant based on the schedule to which it is committed, and that "could pave the way for further expansion of mutual cooperation in construction of more powerplants," IRNA reported.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a March 24 interview with the Los Angeles Times was asked:

Question: Madame Secretary, on Iran, the Europeans are arguing essentially that time is now on our side, that with the agreement for a freeze and with the IAEA monitoring the freeze, it's the Iranians who are in a hurry to get a deal and that they are effectively contained.Ê Do you accept that, and does that mean that we do have time to negotiate onward?

Rice:Ê "Well, it's always better to resolve these things as soon as you can, not later, because Iran is a very closed society, at least from the perspective -- this perspective, that it's not Iraq.Ê It has people going back and forth.Ê It was a dissident group that exposed Natanz and so you have some sources of information but they are by no means perfect and so you want as soon as possible to get a handle on the Iranian program.

"I do think that we made a lot of progress over the last several weeks in that we found that when I was in Europe the first time and the President was in Europe that somehow the conversation had shifted to what the United States was going to do rather than to what the Iranians were going to do, and this is now clearly back on the ground that the Iranians have certain obligations to meet, that there is a unified view of what those obligations are, that there is a unified approach to those, to getting the Iranians to live up to those obligations. And so we're certainly in better shape than we were several weeks ago, but I would hope that the Iranians would want to demonstrate sooner rather than later that they really do now intend to live up to those obligations because a lot is riding on it."

Question:Ê To go back to Sonni's question though, are you comfortable that the current freeze amounts to containment of the Iranian program?

Rice:Ê"I do not think you can ever be certain of any such thing.Ê It is better than nothing to have a freeze, obviously.Ê But the real goal here has to be that the Iranians make a choice that they are going to engage -- that they are not going to engage in activities that heighten suspicion that they're trying to get a nuclear weapon under cover of civilian nuclear program.Ê And there are some very clear steps they could take to do that and they have to be steps that are not easily reversible. And so this is where we are and, as I said, it's a better place than we were a little while ago.Ê But that's because the world is unified.Ê I even thought that -- and we said this -- that the Russian agreement with the Iranians, while we don't understand why the Iranians would want civilian nuclear power at all given their tremendous energy reserves, but at least the Russian agreement also speaks to the question of proliferation risk in terms of fuel take-backs and provision of fuel rather than allowing the Iranians to reprocess."


Today IRNA reported that President Mohammad Khatami today " urged all governments and nations to oppose production and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Addressing the first International Congress on Bioethics, he stressed that opposing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction by those who produce such kinds of armaments, covertly or overtly, has no ethical value."

Previous Stories:
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  Russia opposes taking Iranian nuclear file to UNSC   (11/6/2004)
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