Iran sticks to August deadline for nuclear response

UNITED NATIONS - Tehran will respond in August and not before to a major-power offer of incentives aimed at convincing it to end its nuclear enrichment activities, Iran's foreign minister said today.

"Such a response will be in August. I didn't say early August or mid-August," Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told a news conference.

No response can come before "questions and ambiguities" in the proposal are cleared up, he added.

Iran had previously said it would respond by August 22.

But the Group of Eight industrialised nations told Iran on Thursday to give a "clear and substantive response" next week.

Mottaki, in New York to attend a UN conference on the illicit small arms trade, said Iran's response would be "clear and substantive." However, he added, speaking in Farsi choppily translated into English, "The proposed package contains questions and ambiguities which must be clear."

Iranian officials were meeting with European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana next week and Mottaki acknowledged the meeting might help resolve some of the ambiguities.

But while a response would be announced "as soon as it is done," the process would not be concluded earlier than August because various committees were considering different parts of the incentives package and it would all take time, he said.

John Bolton, the US ambassador to the United Nations, said it was hard to understand why Iran was taking so long.

"We have made it very clear what the choice is. One way leads to a different relationship with us and others. The other leads to increasing isolation, economic sanctions, political pressure. This is a very simple question," he told reporters.

- REUTERS