PARIS— Six world powers began two days of talks with on Monday to seek reassurances that Tehran’s nuclear ambitions are peaceful.
Ahead of the talks in Geneva, Mike Hammer, a spokesman for the said the United States and its allies are looking to see if Iran will enter into discussions “with the seriousness of purpose required to begin to address international concerns.”
British Defense Secretary Liam Fox said on Saturday that the talks — the first in more than a year — needed to make a serious start toward resolving the issue, The Associated Press reported. “We want a negotiated solution, not a military one — but Iran needs to work with us to achieve that outcome,” he said. “We will not look away or back down.”
The Obama administration has become increasingly skeptical that Iran will seriously take up an offer for wide-ranging talks about all issues but based on an agreement to stop or at least suspend nuclear enrichment. Iran denies that it is seeking the capacity for a nuclear bomb to add to its significant missile capacity. Very few in Western governments or in the Middle East believe Tehran’s denials.
In addition to the United States and Britain, the other countries at the talks are China, Russia, France and Germany.
Iran on Sunday claimed for the first time to have used domestically mined uranium ore to make the material needed for uranium enrichment. It called the step a major advance in its atomic program, sending a defiant message before a new round of talks on Iran’s suspect nuclear activities. Western experts said the progress appeared to be more symbolic than substantive and did not bear immediately on whether Iran could accelerate its efforts at enriching uranium, which can fuel either reactors or atom bombs.
But Iran’s successful processing of uranium ore from a domestically mined source, which it has been working on for years, suggested the Iranians had found a way to bypass sanctions that ban them from importing raw uranium. The announcement also reflected Iran’s intention to show it remains undaunted in its pursuit of nuclear capabilities despite some significant recent setbacks.
Those setbacks include increased economic isolation from a range of United Nations sanctions, the mysterious bombing attacks on two Iranian nuclear scientists in Tehran last week and an acknowledgment by President that some of Iran’s centrifuges, used to purify uranium, had been successfully singled out by Internet saboteurs using malignant software.
The White House said Sunday that Iran’s announcement was not unexpected but that it reinforced international suspicions about Iran’s motives for enriching uranium at all. In Tehran on Sunday, Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of who is leading his country’s delegation in Geneva, said the country had succeeded for the first time in domestically producing uranium concentrate from uranium ore mined inside Iran.
The concentrate, known as yellowcake, is a precursor to the uranium fed into spinning centrifuges for enrichment. “This means that Iran has become self-sufficient in the entire fuel cycle,” Mr. Salehi declared. He said at a televised news conference that the announcement meant “we will be taking part in the negotiations with strength and power.”
Mr. Salehi, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said the yellowcake was produced at the Gachin uranium mine in southern Iran and delivered to the uranium conversion facility in the central city of Isfahan for processing into uranium destined for the thousands of centrifuges of Natanz.
Mr. Salehi said the delivery was evidence that last week’s mysterious bombings of the Iranian scientists would not slow the country’s progress. One of the scientists died and the other was wounded.
Iran bought yellowcake from South Africa in the 1980s, but those supplies are running low. Even so, Western experts say Iran can keep the centrifuges at its Natanz plant in the desert running for decades because over the years it has converted so much yellowcake to uranium meant for enrichment.
“This is a face-saving announcement,” David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a private group in Washington that tracks nuclear proliferation, said in an interview. “For years, they’ve been saying that they are mining. So here’s finally some proof.” In a statement, Mr. Hammer of the National Security Council said Iran’s yellowcake announcement was “not unexpected” given that Iran is now banned from importing the material under United Nations sanctions and that it has worked to develop its own program of mining and indigenous production.
“However,” he added, “this calls into further question Iran’s intentions and raises additional concerns at a time when Iran needs to address the concerns of the international community.”
Since 2006, the has repeatedly called on Iran to halt its program of uranium enrichment and has punished it with four rounds of sanctions. Tehran insists it wants enriched uranium to fuel reactors for making electricity and medical isotopes, while the West fears that it wants the material as a way to fuel atom bombs.
