U.S., allies to pressure Iran

At talks scheduled for Thursday in Geneva with Iran, the United States and five other major powers will demand immediate and unfettered access to the newly exposed nuclear facility in Iran, including access to people and documents involved in its construction, and they will insist that Tehran abide by international rules to reveal such projects before construction begins, Obama administration officials said Saturday.

Diplomats will also insist that Iran undertake confidence-building measures, including answering questions about suspected efforts to develop nuclear weapons and accepting a timetable for serious negotiations. Officials said there is no stated deadline, but that if Iran fails to respond seriously by year’s end, the United States and its partners could begin to push for crippling sanctions targeting Iran’s economic and financial links to the world.

In the wake of the discovery of the facility near the holy city of Qom, “it is now a choice for Iran, and the choice became starker,” said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. As an inducement for cooperation, the United States and other powers have offered economic and diplomatic incentives if Iran reins in its nuclear ambitions.

Iranian officials declared Saturday that they notified the International Atomic Energy Agency about the facility in a timely fashion and that IAEA inspectors are welcome to visit it, though they did not say when, or whether they will be able to set up monitoring equipment. Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, denounced the reaction from the United States and other Western powers. “Their embarrassing reaction and their unbalanced response has shocked us,” he told state television.

In his weekly radio address, President Barack Obama emphasized the importance of the showdown at Geneva’s historic Hotel de Ville, which will also include diplomats from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia and China – and will mark the first diplomatic encounter between Iran and the Obama administration.

“This is a serious challenge to the global nonproliferation regime and continues a disturbing pattern of Iranian evasion,” Obama said. “That is why international negotiations with Iran scheduled for Oct. 1 now take on added urgency.”

“We are hopeful that, in preparing for the meeting on Oct. 1, Iran comes and shares with all of us what they are willing to do and gives us a timetable on which they are willing to proceed,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters Saturday after meeting with Arab foreign ministers on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.

Iran, which as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty has a right to enrich uranium, has already signaled that it intends to dismiss questions about the Qom facility as a legalistic dispute of little importance. Salehi said that it was hidden to protect it from possible attacks and that Iran had actually been overly cautious within the framework of the IAEA rules. “We have to inform the agency of the building of nuclear facilities 180 days before insertion of nuclear fuel, but we informed them even sooner,” he said.