U.S. hopes for high-level meeting with Iran
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The United States said on Wednesday that it hoped to hold high-level meetings in the coming weeks with Iran and other five world powers in an effort to ease international concerns over Iran's nuclear program.
"We hope to have the same kind of meeting in the coming weeks that we had last October," State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said, referring to meetings last year in Geneva in which world powers proposed and urged Iran to accept a nuclear fuel swap deal.
Crowley said the U.S. is seeking a process through which Iran would be prepared to engage constructively on a range of issues, including a deal to provide fuel to Iran's research reactor.
"This is expressly the kind of dialogue that we need to have with Iran to be able to resolve the questions that we have and other countries have," he said.
"The right forum for cooperation is the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) and the right channel for communications is through the P5+1," he added.
In October 2009, China, France, Germany, Russia, UK and the U.S. proposed in talks held in Geneva that Iran ship most of its existing low-grade enriched uranium to Russia and France, where the enriched uranium would be processed into fuel rods with the purity of 20 percent.
According to the proposal, the enriched uranium with higher purity would be then transported back to Iran, used as nuclear fuel in research nuclear reactor for the manufacture of medical radioisotopes. But Iran has not implemented the proposal.
Turkey, Iran and Brazil signed an agreement on May 17, dubbed Tehran declaration, in which Iran committed itself to giving 1,200 kg of its 3.5 percent enriched uranium to Turkey in exchange for 20 percent enriched uranium it will receive from Western countries to be used as fuel in the nuclear research reactor in Tehran.
Despite the deal, the UN Security Council still adopted Resolution 1929 in June to impose the fourth round of sanctions on Iran since 2006.
Since then, the U.S., EU and Canada have announced that they will impose more sanctions on Iran that go beyond UN resolution.
Iran's representative to IAEA said on Monday that Iran is ready to resume talks over its nuclear fuel swap without conditions.
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