Iran Hints at Nuclear Initiative

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Thursday that his government had new proposals designed to resolve an international dispute over his country’s controversial nuclear program, but declined to offer details of either the initiative or when it might be presented.

He is scheduled to address the United Nations General Assembly on Saturday, the second time in four days.

The Iranian leader mentioned the new initiative at an on-the-record breakfast with about a dozen American newspaper editors and reporters at a midtown Manhattan hotel.

During the hourlong meeting, Ahmadinejad reiterated his country’s insistence that its nuclear program was for peaceful purposes only and complained that states with atomic weapons were trying to maintain a monopoly on nuclear technology.

“There is some kind of nuclear apartheid,” he said.

During a meeting Wednesday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the fringes of the U.N. summit, Ahmadinejad appeared to raise the stakes in the nuclear controversy when he reportedly offered to transfer nuclear know-how to other Muslim countries. The report on the Erdogan meeting was carried by Iran’s official news agency, IRNA.

When asked directly at Thursday’s breakfast about sharing nuclear technology, Ahmadinejad made no such commitment, giving only an ambiguous answer.

His comments to American journalists came several hours before a meeting at the U.N. between his foreign minister and counterparts from three European Union countries that failed to make any headway on negotiating an end to Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

The EU-Iran talks broke down last month after Iran announced that it would end a freeze it had observed on all nuclear activities during the negotiations.

The United States, convinced that Iran wants to build nuclear weapons, is pressing other countries to help bring the Tehran government before the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions if it fails to return to negotiations. The International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, is scheduled to discuss the issue when it meets Monday in Vienna.

With key nations, including Russia, China and India, reluctant to take punitive measures against Iran, it is unlikely that the U.S. will force a vote for referral at Monday’s meeting of the agency’s 35-member governing board. Still, U.S. officials Thursday appeared confident that they could bring enough pressure to force Iran’s hand.

“We’re convinced there will be increasing pressure on the Iranians over the next week or two to return to the negotiating table,” R. Nicholas Burns, the undersecretary of State for political affairs, told reporters at a briefing late Thursday.

Although the Iranian leader offered no details on the new proposals, observers say Iran has already provided some signals of its intent.

Patrick Clawson, deputy director for research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Iran had indicated it might propose holding talks with other nations besides Britain, France and Germany. With Bush administration backing, the three nations have tried to negotiate a package of economic, political and security incentives for Iran in return for its giving up efforts to produce its own nuclear fuel.

“They’ve offered hints that they’d like to see the negotiation be expanded to include developing countries,” Clawson said in a telephone interview. States that do not possess nuclear technology would be reluctant to insist that Iran accept restrictions that may one day apply to them.

“Our aim all the way through in this when we started these negotiations was to keep the matter out of the Security Council,” British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told reporters after the EU-Iran meeting. “What we’re going to do is to listen carefully to what the president is going to say on Saturday afternoon and we’ll take it from there.”

In his first meeting with a sizable group of representatives of the American media, Ahmadinejad appeared relaxed and responded in measured detail to several questions, although his answers occasionally meandered onto a more philosophical plane.

He denied charges directed at him since his election victory that he had been part of the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. The takeover, led by radical students at the vanguard of Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist revolution, began a siege in which 52 Americans were held hostage in the embassy for 444 days.

On Thursday, Ahmadinejad called the accusations “rumors,” spread by those opposed to Iran’s political direction over the last quarter-century.

“This is an allegation that has absolutely no basis,” he told the group.

An investigation launched by the State Department in late June, after several former hostages said they recognized the newly elected president as one of their captors, remains inconclusive.

Last week, department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters that the inquiry was incomplete.

“It’s incomplete for the simple reason that the Iranian government has not answered remaining questions about his activities during this period,” McCormack said.

“There’s only so much we can find out definitely without some explanations from the Iranian government,” a senior State Department official said Thursday. He declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.

*

Times staff writer Maggie Farley at the United Nations contributed to this report.