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Rice says world must stop Iran's nukes

2004/8/10
WASHINGTON, AP

With Iran stepping up its nuclear program, a top White House aide said Sunday the world finally is "worried and suspicious" over the Iranians' intentions and is determined not to let Tehran produce a nuclear weapon.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice also said the Bush administration sees a new international willingness to act against Iran's nuclear program. She credited the changed attitude to the Americans' insistence that Iran's effort put the world in peril.

She would not say whether the United States would act alone to end the program if the administration could not win international support.

Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, announced a week ago that his country had resumed building nuclear centrifuges. He said Iran was retaliating for the West's failure to force the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency to close its file on possible Iranian violations of nuclear nonproliferation rules.

Kharrazi said Iran was not resuming enrichment of uranium, which requires a centrifuge. But, he said, Iran had restarted manufacturing the device because Britain, Germany and France had not stopped the investigation by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

"The United States was the first to say that Iran was a threat in this way, to try and convince the international community that Iran was trying, under the cover of a civilian nuclear program, to actually bring about a nuclear weapons program," Rice said on CNN's "Late Edition."

"I think we've finally now got the world community to a place, and the International Atomic Energy Agency to a place, that it is worried and suspicious of the Iranian activities," she said. "Iran is facing for the first time real resistance to trying to take these steps."

Bush, in his 2002 State of the Union address, included Iran with North Korea and Iraq in an "axis of evil" dedicated to developing nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.

Since then, North Korea has publicly resumed its nuclear development program. In Iraq, invading U.S.-led forces have found no such programs after President Saddam Hussein was deposed.

Iran announced in June that it would resume its centrifuge program. Afterward, the U.S. official whose job is to slow the global atomic arms race, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, told Congress that Iran was jabbing "a thumb in the eye of the international community."

On NBC's "Meet the Press," Rice reasserted that the world has fallen in line on Iran and said she expects next month to get a very strong statement from the IAEA "that Iran will either be isolated, or it will submit to the will of the international community."

She also said, "We cannot allow the Iranians to develop a nuclear weapon. The international community has got to find a way to come together and to make certain that does not happen."

http://www.chinapost.com.tw/international/detail.asp?ID=51413&GRP=D

Bush Sees Joint World Effort to Press Iran on Nuclear Issue
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

Published: August 10, 2004

NNANDALE, Va., Aug. 9 - President Bush said Monday that the United States would maintain pressure on Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons program, emphasizing that his administration was working with other countries and not confronting Iran on its own.

"Iran must comply with the demands of the free world, and that's where we sit right now," Mr. Bush told a Republican crowd at an "Ask President Bush" campaign event in this Washington suburb. "And my attitude is that we've got to keep pressure on the government, and help others keep pressure on the government, so there's kind of a universal condemnation of illegal weapons activities."

The president has come under searing criticism from his Democratic competitor, Senator John Kerry, for what Mr. Kerry calls Mr. Bush's go-it-alone approach to foreign policy, which he says has left the United States isolated in the world. Mr. Kerry has also attacked Mr. Bush for allowing Iran to move forward with its nuclear ambitions while going to war with Iraq, where almost no evidence of a nuclear weapons program was found.

Mr. Bush has not directly answered Mr. Kerry's charges, but on Monday he repeatedly emphasized how much the United States was cooperating with other nations to try to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, particularly in Iran.

"We've relied upon others to send the message for us," he told the crowd in the gymnasium at the Annandale campus of Northern Virginia Community College. "And the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Great Britain have gone in as a group to send a message on behalf of the free world that Iran must comply with the demands of the free world."

He concluded that "good foreign policy works with other countries, and we will."

At the same time, Mr. Bush acknowledged that the United States had exhausted an array of sanctions against Iran, which has felt minimal effect from them because of its robust foreign trade. "We've totally sanctioned them," he said. "In other words, there's no sanctions - you can't - we're out of sanctions."

On Sunday, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" that she expected that the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency would make "a very strong statement" next month forcing Iran to chose between being isolated internationally or abandoning its nuclear weapons ambitions. But she stopped short of saying whether the United States would try to organize its allies to impose sanctions in the Security Council.

So far, major Western European nations and Russia have resisted American efforts to impose sanctions against Iran.

In a sign of continuing difficulties in negotiations with Iran, a European official said in Vienna that the Tehran government had recently presented a list of demands that included its insistence on continuing its program to enrich uranium, according to The Associated Press. Western experts say the program is aimed at producing a nuclear weapon.

The demands were said to have been given to French, German and British negotiators. The A.P. reported that European officials were disappointed that Iran had not been more forthcoming in recent talks.

Mr. Bush made his remarks about Iran in response to a question from an invited audience member, who was one of several in the crowd to ask about foreign policy. His campaign officials said Monday's "Ask President Bush" theme was the United States as an "ownership society," which allowed the president to promote policies that he said would encourage Americans to own their own homes, open health savings accounts, start their own businesses or plan for retirement. The event, in the strongly Republican state of Virginia, was timed to the release of a new Bush campaign advertisement, called "Ownership," that has begun airing in 18 closely fought states as well as nationally on cable channels.

Kerry campaign officials said the fact that Mr. Bush was spending time in Virginia three weeks before the Republican convention showed that his campaign was highly worried about losing a state that he won handily in 2000.

Bush campaign officials countered that the president had business at the White House all day, and that campaigning in suburban Virginia was about proximity, not desperation

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/10/international/middleeast/10bush.html?ex=1092801600&en=df01efbc8691745e&ei=5040&partner=MOREOVER

Pressure stays on Iran, Bush says

Big News Network.com Tuesday 10th August, 2004

U.S. President George Bush Monday said continuing international pressure is necessary to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

Britain, France and Germany, which have been leading the way in negotiations with Iran's Islamic government, must make it clear to Iran and to the world that Iran must abandon her nuclear ambitions, he said.

Bush made the remarks during a question-and-answer session at Northern Virginia Community College, where the focus of his remarks were on advancing an ownership society -- part and parcel of his vision for economic recovery and facing new economic challenges.

Bush said Washington was working with the United Nation's International Atomic Energy Agency as well as allies on Iran, but noted U.S. sanctions on Tehran were moot.

The United States has had no diplomatic relations with Iran since militants took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and held U.S. diplomats hostage. U.S. economic sanctions have been in force ever since.

The United States believes Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons.

The IAEA, which has admonished Tehran for failing to adhere to non-proliferation rules, could ask the U.N. Security Council to impose international sanctions as early as next month.

http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=aeaccd3db19b0ded

New twist in Iran nuclear row
From correspondents in London

10aug04

TRACES of enriched uranium detected in Iran are now believed to have come from equipment provided by a smuggling network headed by Pakistan's disgraced former nuclear chief scientist, according to a report today.

The traces have been at the heart of an ongoing international dispute over whether Tehran has reneged on its obligations to inform the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of all enrichment activities.

"IAEA inspectors have reached a tentative conclusion that the contamination came from equipment provided by the nuclear smuggling network headed by Pakistani scientist A Q Khan," Jane's Defence Weekly magazine said, quoting "sources close to the agency".

It said inspectors believed they could confirm that a sample of uranium enriched to 54 per cent, found at one Iranian site, had come from Pakistani equipment.

"The confirmation was only possible after Islamabad gave the IAEA data to verify the uranium source and the US provided a simulation of the Pakistani nuclear program that matched the account," Jane's said.

A separate contamination sample, of uranium enriched to 36 per cent, derived from Russian equipment that Moscow had supplied to China, which in turn passed it on to Pakistan as part of a previous nuclear assistance program, it said.

From Pakistan, it was sold by Mr Khan to Iran, it added.

"The sources note that the origins of several other contamination samples are difficult to trace and may never be known," Jane's said.

It had previously been known that inspectors from the Vienna-based IAEA had found traces of highly-enriched uranium inside Iran - leading to suspicions Iran had been trying to produce nuclear bombs and not just atomic energy as it insists.

But Tehran maintained that the traces found their way into the country on equipment bought on an international black market operated by Pakistan's disgraced former nuclear chief, Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Pakistan's foreign minister Khurshid Mahmud Kasuri, on a visit to Tehran, said Islamabad was co-operating with a UN probe into Iran's suspect nuclear program.

But he ruled out allowing inspectors into Pakistan as part of the crucial investigation.

In Washington, US President George W. Bush called on Iran to "abandon her nuclear ambitions" and vowed to stand with European allies to pressure Tehran to do so.

http://townsvillebulletin.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,7034,10399394%255E1702,00.html