EU May Offer Iran a Reactor and Other Incentives

UNITED NATIONS — The European Union is considering offering Iran a light-water reactor as part of an incentive package to persuade the country to halt uranium enrichment, European diplomats said Tuesday.

U.S. officials reacted coolly, and Iran’s foreign minister said the country would not give up its right to enrichment at any price.

Last year, Iran rejected a European offer of the possibility of a light-water reactor along with trade and financial incentives. The new proposal is more explicit in its offer to help build and finance the reactor, a European diplomat said.

Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik said the new plan would also provide the enriched uranium to fuel the reactor and remove the plutonium waste so it could not be used for weapons.

The EU proposal echoes an offer the U.S. made to North Korea in the 1990s to provide two light-water reactors if Pyongyang gave up a plutonium-producing heavy-water research reactor and complied with U.N. inspections. The deal collapsed in 2002 after the U.S. asserted that North Korea had forged ahead with a secret weapons program based on highly enriched uranium.

“The intention is not to push Iran into further isolation but to find a way to bring Iran back to a negotiating track,” Plassnik said Monday after a meeting of EU foreign ministers. “But we will also look at measures to be taken should Iran continue to reject this course.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told the representatives of Britain, France and Germany on Monday that enrichment would not be halted, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

“Any call for a suspension or pause is illogical and unacceptable and will without any doubt be rejected,” he said.

The European officials will meet with their counterparts from the U.S., Russia and China on Friday to work out a package of carrots and sticks in an attempt to compel Tehran to cease enrichment, which can produce reactor fuel or bomb material.

U.S. officials have made clear that they think the sticks will be more effective. Last week at a foreign ministers’ meeting at the United Nations, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pushed for the quick adoption of a resolution one step short of sanctions to heighten pressure on Iran.

Russia and China balked, and European ministers asked for a week’s grace period to put together a combination of rewards and penalties before moving toward the resolution, which would legally compel Iran to comply or face future penalties.

The incentives package will not be formalized until after the Friday meeting, but U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John R. Bolton said Washington would not consider a deal if Iran did not halt enrichment first. “It’s a package of incentives and disincentives, all of which have to be considered before we sign on,” he said.

Iran announced with great domestic fanfare in April that it had successfully enriched uranium to the level necessary to fuel a power plant, but far short of weapons grade. Tehran insists that its atomic activities are strictly peaceful and that it has the right under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to develop nuclear technology.

But Iran’s 18 years of secret nuclear research have heightened suspicions that it is pursuing weapons technology under the cover of an energy program.

European diplomats said they hoped that the package had the right combination to draw both Iran and the United States to the negotiating table.

“Carrots and sticks are two necessary elements of a negotiation process,” said German Ambassador to the U.N. Gunter Pleuger. “The trick is to find the right balance: If the stick is too big and too threatening, the partner might shy away from the whole process.”

David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, said the European offer of a light-water reactor might alienate Russia, which has helped Iran build its sole nuclear reactor at Bushehr and is negotiating to provide more.

“The European offer is very generous, but Iran thinks it can get it all -- both their enrichment program and a reactor from Russia or somewhere else. As long as they think that, they are not going to budge,” Albright said.

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Times staff writer Jeffrey Fleishman in Berlin contributed to this report.