Iran Signals Continued Nuclear Defiance Before Geneva Talks

James Phillips / December 06, 2010

Today, representatives of Iran and the P5 + 1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany) convened for talks on Iran’s nuclear program in Geneva.

These are the first face-to-face talks on that subject for 14 months. Iran’s unpredictable regime broke off talks last year after initially accepting “in principle” a nuclear deal that would have sent much of Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium out of the country in exchange for more highly enriched uranium to fuel the Tehran research reactor.

This time around, Western diplomats have lowered their expectations about gaining any concrete results. The defiant Iranian regime has signaled that it is determined to continue its uranium enrichment activities despite four rounds of U.N. sanctions. The day before the meeting in Geneva the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, Ali Akbar Salehi, announced that Iran would use domestically produced uranium concentrates, known as yellowcake, for the first time, thereby cutting its reliance on imports of uranium for nuclear fuel. Salehi claimed that “this means that Iran has become self-sufficient in the entire fuel cycle.” (more…)