ANALYSIS: Experts gloomy about Iranian uranium deal

By Albert Otti and Miriam Bandar Oct 30, 2009, 15:50 GMT

Vienna - There is little hope that Iran will agree to an multinational deal to reduce its uranium stockpile, experts said Friday, as the plan has got caught up in Iran's fractious internal politics.

While the United States, Russia and France have said they support the 4-country plan by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iran gave only an initial response Thursday and asked for amendments.

'The responsibility for the probable failure lies fully with Iran,' said Harald Mueller, the head of the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt.

The IAEA plan foresees that Iran would ship out most of its stock of low-enriched uranium to Russia and France for further enrichment and processing into fuel for a medical-use reactor in Tehran.

But according to official sources and US news reports, Iran's IAEA ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh suggested to the nuclear agency in Vienna that his country had differing views on key parts of the plan.

Iranian media have reported that Iran would like to ship out its uranium only in installments, meanwhile replenishing its stock by operating the Natanz enrichment facility.

Meanwhile, officials suggested that Iran might be after a swap of uranium for nuclear fuel, rather than waiting for about one year to receive the finished product from abroad.

Non-proliferation expert Mark Fitzpatrick said the aim of the deal was to build confidence by reducing Iran's uranium stock at least for some time.

'It is unfortunate that it is not likely to be implemented, if Iran tries to continue with this posture of making the deal unpalatable for the other side,' said Fitzpatrick, a former senior US diplomat who works at the IISS think tank in London.

Tehran has not fully agreed to the deal because different factions in Iran are trying to prevent others from making a deal with the United States before they do, Fitzpatrick said.

'They all want to deny each other the big prize. The big prize is the United States,' he said.

Iran's Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani has been among those demanding changes to the uranium arrangement.

It was ironic that Larijani is a former nuclear negotiator whom President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad prevented from making a deal with the West in the past, Fitzpatrick said, noting that this shows that the internal bickering is about power, not policies.

The deal was being used in Tehran to 'give Ahmadinejad a hard time,' said Walter Posch, an Iran expert at the Austrian Defence Academy in Vienna.

The president was re-elected in June, but the opposition and its supporters accuse him of vote fraud.

While some experts stressed internal power struggles, Mueller of the Peace Research Institute said Iran's reluctance in accepting the fuel deal had to do with the strategic policy of the country's hard- line leadership, headed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The leaders want to retain the option for using the nuclear programme for nuclear weapons, he said.

Tehran says it is enriching uranium only to power reactors, but the technology can also be used to make nuclear weapons material.

The US and France have called on Iran to make its position on the IAEA proposal clear. The French government has been vocal in calling for additional international sanctions if there is no progress on the Iranian nuclear issue by the end of the year.

But Posch said new punitive measures would be counterproductive, and that there was a general lack of trust between Iran and the world powers Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the US, which have taken up talks in October.

'As long as mutual trust has not been achieved, there will be no results,' he said.