Washington - France and Germany were prepared in spring 2005 to negotiate on an Iranian proposal to convert all of its enriched uranium to fuel rods, making it impossible to use it for nuclear weapons, but Britain vetoed the deal at the insistence of the United States, according to a new account by a former top Iranian nuclear negotiator.
Seyed Hossein Mousavian, who had led Iran's nuclear negotiating team in 2004 and 2005, makes it clear that the reason that offer was rejected was that the George W. Bush administration refused to countenance any Iranian enrichment capability, regardless of the circumstances.
Mousavian reveals previously unknown details about that pivotal episode in the diplomacy surrounding the Iran nuclear issue in memoirs published Tuesday.
Mousavian, now a visiting research scholar at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, had been a top political aide to former president Hashemi Rafsanjani and head of the foreign relations committee of Iran's Supreme National Security Council during his political-diplomatic career in Iran.
Once the fuel rods were fabricated, it would be practically impossible for Iran to reconvert them for military purposes.
The European delegations asked for a break to discuss it among themselves, Jenkins recalled, but soon decided to tell Iran they would "need more time to consider further".
But the Europeans did not seek to explore the Iranian offer further.
Mousavian reveals that Iran learned a few weeks after that meeting that the Europeans had no intention of negotiating any agreement that would allow Iran to have any enrichment programme. On Apr. 12, 2005, Mousavian recounts, the French ambassador to Iran, Francois Nicoullaud, told him it was impossible for the Europeans to negotiate on the Iranian proposal.
"For the U.S. the enrichment in Iran is a red line which the EU cannot cross," Mousavian quotes Nicoullaud as saying.
In June 2009, Nicoullaud signed a statement with five other former European ambassadors to Iran recalling that in 2005 "Iran was ready to discuss a ceiling limit for the number of its centrifuges and to maintain its rate of enrichment far below the high levels necessary for weapons," but that "the Europeans and the Americans wanted to compel Iran to forsake its enrichment program entirely."
