Eurasia Press & News
TEHRAN (FNA)- EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana in his response letter to Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili asked for continuation of talks with Iran, the Secretariat of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) announced here on Friday.
Solana said in the letter which was delivered to Iran’s embassy in Brussels on Thursday as a response to the letter addressed to him by Jalili recently that questions posed by Iran regarding 5+1 countries’ proposals are comprehensible.
He said that the 5+1 countries and himself are committed to seek a diplomatic solution to the problem as before.
According to the Islamic republic news agency, he also asked for continuation of talks aimed at clarification of the few remaining ambiguities regarding Iran’s nuclear program.
Jalili sent a letter to Solana which discloses Iran’s stance on the West’s behavior towards Iran’s nuclear activities in October.
“The lack of civilization of dialogue has led some powers to adopt pressure means instead of logic,” the letter said, adding that “Iran’s proposal of disarmament and non-proliferation is not pleasing for the powers who have been generating such arms for years.”
The United States and its Western allies accuse Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons under the cover of a civilian nuclear program, while they have never presented any corroborative document to substantiate their allegations. Iran denies the charges and insists that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.
Tehran stresses that the country has always pursued a civilian path to provide power to the growing number of Iranian population, whose fossil fuel would eventually run dry.
Iran is under three rounds of UN Security Council sanctions for turning down West’s calls to give up its right of uranium enrichment, saying the demand is politically tainted and illogical.
On June 14, Solana handed an offer of incentives to the Iranian authorities on behalf of six major powers of Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States during his visit to Tehran in a bid to persuade Iran to give up uranium enrichment, a right stipulated in the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) for all signatories.
Iran has said that it would not provide a final response to the West’s offer until certain ambiguities existing in the package are removed.
Iran also presented a more all-embracing package of proposals to world powers in May, offering collective cooperation in solving major world issues. But the world powers have not yet provided a response to Iran’s proposals.
Iran insists that it should continue enriching uranium because it needs to provide fuel to a 300-megawatt light-water reactor it is building in the southwestern town of Darkhoveyn as well as its first nuclear power plant in the southern port city of Bushehr.
Iran currently suffers from an electricity shortage that has forced the country into adopting a rationing program by scheduling power outages – of up to two hours a day – across both urban and rural areas.
Iran plans to construct additional nuclear power plants to provide for the electricity needs of its growing population.
The Islamic Republic says that it considers its nuclear case closed as it has come clean of IAEA’s questions and suspicions about its past nuclear activities.
Political observers believe that the United States has remained at loggerheads with Iran mainly over the independent and home-grown nature of Tehran’s nuclear technology, which gives the Islamic Republic the potential to turn into a world power and a role model for other third-world countries. Washington has laid much pressure on Iran to make it give up the most sensitive and advanced part of the technology, which is uranium enrichment, a process used for producing nuclear fuel for power plants.
Washington’s push for additional UN penalties contradicts a recent report by 16 US intelligence bodies that endorsed the civilian nature of Iran’s programs. Following the US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) and similar reports by the IAEA head – one in November and the other one in February – which praised Iran’s truthfulness about key aspects of its past nuclear activities and announced settlement of outstanding issues with Tehran, any effort to impose further sanctions on Iran seems to be completely irrational.
The February report by the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, praised Iran’s cooperation in clearing up all of the past questions over its nuclear program, vindicating Iran’s nuclear program and leaving no justification for any new UN sanctions.
The UN nuclear watchdog has so far carried out at least 14 surprise inspections of Iran’s nuclear sites so far, but found nothing to support West’s allegations.
Also in his latest report to the 35-nation Board of Governors, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei confirmed “the non-diversion” of nuclear material in Iran and added that the agency had found no “components of a nuclear weapon” or “related nuclear physics studies” in the country.
The IAEA report confirmed that Iran has managed to enrich uranium-235 to a level “less than 5 percent”. Such a rate is consistent with the construction of a nuclear power plant. Nuclear arms production, meanwhile, requires an enrichment level of above 90 percent.
The Vienna-based UN nuclear watchdog continues snap inspections of Iranian nuclear sites and has reported that all “declared nuclear material in Iran has been accounted for, and therefore such material is not diverted to prohibited activities.”
Mohammed ElBaradei, chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, recently said that Iran remains far from acquiring capabilities to develop nuclear weapons as it is still lacking the key components to produce an atomic weapon.
“They do not have even the nuclear material, the raw unenriched uranium to develop one nuclear weapon if they decide to do so,” said the head of the UN nuclear watchdog agency.
Many world nations have called the UN Security Council pressure against Iran unjustified, especially in the wake of recent IAEA reports, stressing that Tehran’s case should be normalized and returned to the UN nuclear watchdog due to the Islamic Republic’s increased cooperation with the agency.
