Security Council threats won’t work, Iran tells West

TEHRAN (Reuters) – Iran said on Sunday threats of U.N.
Security Council referral would not persuade it to abandon its
nuclear program.

U.S. and European Union officials have warned they will
push for Iran’s nuclear case to be sent to the Security Council
– which could impose sanctions — if Tehran does not halt all
nuclear fuel work and resume negotiations with the EU.

But Iran, which denies harboring secret plans to make
atomic bombs, says it has no intention of freezing uranium
conversion at its Isfahan plant — where U.N. seals were broken
and work resumed last month.

“Gone is the time when they could deny Iran its rights by
threatening it,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza
Asefi.

“It’s our legitimate right to have peaceful nuclear
technology and we will not give that up,” he told a weekly news
conference.

“The Isfahan issue belongs to the past and we are not going
to go back on that, we should think of other issues now,” he
added.

A report by the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog on Friday confirmed
Iran had converted several tonnes of raw uranium into a gas at
Isfahan which could at a later stage be enriched to make atomic
reactor or bomb-grade fuel.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report also
said it could not yet conclude that Tehran had no secrete
atomic weapons program.

Iran says it has answered almost all of the IAEA’s
outstanding questions about its nuclear program and that
nothing has been uncovered which would justify sending Tehran
to the Security Council.

Speaking on state television on Saturday night, the deputy
head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization Mohammad Saeedi
described talk of Security Council referral as “ridiculous.”

Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, who has been
engaged in a flurry of diplomacy with non-Western countries
ahead of an IAEA meeting later this month, said Tehran would
not be bullied.

“The belief that they can weaken the will of this great
nation with the baton of the Security Council is mistaken logic
and they are only losing their dignity,” he told state
television.

“They are asking why we do not continue negotiations, but
they are the ones who canceled talks,” he added.