U.N. Won’t Deter Iran’s Research, President Says

Iran will not be deflected from its drive to develop nuclear technology if it is referred to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Saturday.

“If they want to destroy the Iranian nation’s rights by that course, they will not succeed,” Ahmadinejad said at a news conference.

The United States and European Union nations want Iran referred to the United Nations because, they say, it has failed to allay their suspicions that its nuclear program is aimed at developing weapons.

Iran raised the stakes in the dispute last week by removing U.N. seals to gain access to equipment that purifies uranium, which can be used to generate power or, if highly enriched, in bombs.

Despite repeated questions, Ahmadinejad declined to clarify whether the atomic research that Iran was resuming would involve small-scale production of enriched uranium, as the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, has said.

Ahmadinejad was asked at the news conference whether Iran would retaliate by playing the “oil weapon” and hold back the world’s second-biggest reserves of crude from hungry energy markets.

“We have the necessary tools to defend our rights,” he said. “Those who use harsh language against Iran need Iran 10 times more than we need them.”

The United States, Britain, Germany and France say that nuclear talks with Iran are at a dead end, and that they will ask the board of the IAEA to pass the case to the Security Council.

They said last week that Iran had consistently breached its commitments and failed to show its nuclear activities were peaceful. Tehran denies it is seeking to develop nuclear weapons and says it needs nuclear technology only to generate electricity.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry released a statement Saturday evening saying it was still open to negotiations with the three European nations but repeated its threat to resume atomic fuel production if the case went beyond the IAEA.

“A wide range of activities are voluntarily suspended in accordance with the Nonproliferation Treaty,” the statement read, referring principally to the freeze on enrichment of uranium.

“Any illogical attempt to derail the process of solving the issue outside the technical and logical IAEA path will thoroughly change that,” said the statement, which was reported by the official IRNA news agency.