Iran plans to hold talks with all 15 members of the UN Security Council to discuss a nuclear fuel deal, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Monday.
He said the deal, under which Iranian stockpiles of low-enriched uranium would be sent to France and Russia to be turned into reactor fuel, could be finalized in two weeks if all sides showed the necessary will, Iran's ILNA news agency reported.
He said the talks, to begin "in the coming days," will focus on the "fuel exchange [deal]" and will be conducted by Iran's missions in the respective countries.
The UN-sponsored deal to supply nuclear fuel for a research reactor in Tehran proposes Iran ship out low-enriched uranium to be processed into higher-grade nuclear fuel and then returned to Iran.
However, Iran insists it will accept nothing less than a simultaneous exchange inside the Islamic republic, saying it has not received guarantees the fuel will actually be delivered.
"In principle the issue of fuel exchange has been agreed upon. We think details could be worked out," Mottaki told a press conference after a two-day international nuclear disarmament conference in Tehran.
He said the Tehran conference discussed the need to "create areas free of weapons of mass destruction, especially in the Middle East," and for Israel to join the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
The conference opened in Tehran on Saturday and brought together representatives from 60 countries, including China, Russia, Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey and France, under the banner Nuclear Energy for All, Nuclear Weapons for None.
In his address to the conference, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad offered his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons.
He said nuclear powers such as the United States should be expelled from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
He said that the United States and its vast arsenal of atomic warheads, is delaying the long-awaited prospect of global nuclear disarmament, while its ongoing development of atomic weapons as part of the so-called deterrence policy has been the main reason behind the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in recent years.
MOSCOW, April 19 (RIA Novosti)
