U.S. Balks at Science Pact to Protest Russia-Iran Reactor Deal : Technology: Cancellation of meeting is in response to Moscow plan to supply Tehran with nuclear plants.

In a pointed reaction to Russia’s deal to build nuclear reactors for Iran, the Clinton Administration has canceled a high-level meeting next week at which an agreement establishing a broad scientific exchange program was to be renewed.

U.S. officials have told Russia that they have “not made a decision to renew the agreement,” a senior Energy Department official said, a tough stance that clearly reverses the previous intention to keep the agreement alive.

The Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy Agreement was first signed 20 years ago and now supports hundreds of U.S. researchers who collaborate with Russian scientists in such areas as fusion energy, nuclear safety, fundamental matter and the environmental restoration of contaminated sites.

The agreement expires at the end of May and had been expected to be renewed, as it has been every five years since its inception by then-President Richard Nixon in 1973 during the Cold War.

“It would be a very significant event if we break this off,” said the official at the Energy Department, the lead agency in negotiating and managing the agreement.

Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary and Russian Atomic Energy Minister Viktor N. Mikhailov were scheduled to meet in Washington next week to sign the new agreement. But negotiations have stopped, and no document now exists, the Energy Department official said.

An Administration official called the move a “targeted response” directed at Russia’s Atomic Energy Ministry, which signed the Iranian deal and is also the signatory agency to the cooperation agreement. The official added that the Administration will not stop economic aid to Russia, as some Republicans have urged.

“This is the one particular step we are taking so far,” he said.

The dispute with Russia flared earlier this year, after Moscow signed a contract worth $800 million to complete a 1,300-megawatt nuclear reactor, a German project halted by Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution. It also expects to build three more such reactors for an additional $2.2 billion.

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Secretary of State Warren Christopher has pressed Russia to cancel the deal, charging that Iran is engaged in a crash effort to develop nuclear weapons and that the reactors will supply plutonium for bombs.

Separately, Christopher said Thursday that the United States will consider ways of blocking a $1-billion contract signed by the U.S. oil company Conoco with Iran to develop an offshore oil field in the Persian Gulf. He gave no indication what steps the Administration might take.

Although the oil deal, announced earlier this week, is legal under U.S. law, Christopher said that Iran can be expected to use income from the oil operation “to increase their projection of terror.”

The U.S. decision to cancel the Russian meeting next week, which so far is the only formal action taken against Russia for the Iranian deal, was made by the National Security Council, the State Department and the Energy Department.

But with nearly two months before the agreement expires, Energy Department officials believe that there is sufficient time to renew it if the larger issue with the Iranian reactor can be settled.

Russian officials have defended their deal with Iran, asserting that Russia’s nuclear industry badly needs new business and that Iran lacks the technical capability to extract plutonium from the nuclear fuel rods that would be used in the reactor.

The Russian Foreign Ministry also has asserted that the Iranian reactor is similar to the two light-water reactors that the United States has agreed to help provide to North Korea in exchange for Pyongyang’s agreement to dismantle a nuclear program that outsiders suspect of developing atomic weapons.

If the cooperative agreement lapses, it would throw into disarray scores of projects in the United States and Russia at national laboratories and universities, as well as some private business arrangements involving the exchange of sensitive technology.

The loss of those efforts would hurt the American as well as the Russian scientific and business community, experts said.

“They lose, we lose,” said Manning Muntzing, a Washington attorney who is former president of the American Nuclear Society. “But the U.S. is taking the view that this is one of the things they will use as leverage in the Iranian dispute.”

Sidney Drell, deputy director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator and one of the nation’s top experts on nuclear weapons issues, said: “It would be a loss. There is a lot of good cooperation going on.”

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Under the agreement, the Energy Department has four memoranda of cooperation that cover a number of technologies in which Russian scientists are recognized experts.

Among the projects that fall under the agreement umbrella, for example, is an exchange program in which Russian scientists are providing technology to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for growing optical crystals that will go into a fusion laser, known as the National Ignition Facility.

In another cooperative program, Livermore acts as a broker for international sales of Russian uranium, which will help Russia to market its vast uranium supply and provide some U.S. controls that will prevent weapons proliferation.

Private contractors are nervously trying to determine how seriously a lapse of the agreement will upset their growing commercial cooperation.

Times staff writer Jim Mann contributed to this report.