Talks Must Progress, Rice Warns Iran

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned Iran on Wednesday that it risked U.N. action if negotiations with Europe over its nuclear program didn’t progress.

Rice said that the United States had set no deadline on the talks but that they could not go on forever. She said the Bush administration had not changed its view that the United Nations should step in to get tougher on Tehran.

Nearing the end of a fence-mending tour of European allies, Rice also said she had encountered “a kind of coming together of common purpose” on another troubled front: Iraq.

Several countries made commitments to help train Iraqi forces and participate in an upcoming North Atlantic Treaty Organization training mission, she said.

“I heard devotion to helping more on the reconstruction side and, most importantly, to helping with the training of the security forces inside of Iraq, outside of Iraq, in the NATO training mission,” she said.

In Washington, President Bush said Iranians needed to know the free world was working together to send a clear message: Don’t develop a nuclear weapon.

“And the reason we’re sending that message is because Iran with a nuclear weapon would be a very destabilizing force in the world,” he said.

Iran says its nuclear program is for energy, not weapons. In Tehran, President Mohammad Khatami said Wednesday that no Iranian government would ever abandon the progress the country had made in developing peaceful nuclear technology.

That comment did not bode well for negotiations with Britain, France and Germany, the three countries trying to persuade Iran to permanently halt its enrichment of uranium. They have promised economic and technological aid in return.

Rice said earlier Wednesday that Iranians should “hear that the discussions that they are in with the Europeans are not going to be a kind of way station where they are allowed to continue their activities, that there’s going to be an end to this and that they are going to end up in the [U.N.] Security Council.”