Iranian envoy meets nuclearagency head

Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator today said his country was ready to compromise on its contentious atomic programme, but offered no specifics as he headed into a meeting with the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Expectations were low from the talks between Iran’s Ali Larijani and the IAEA’s Mohamed ElBaradei.

Tomorrow Larijani is due to meet with Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief.

Diplomats familiar with the issue suggested Iran may be looking for no more than a platform to show it was serious about negotiating differences over its nuclear activities – even while refusing to give on the key international demand, a stop to uranium enrichment.

“We are unaware that he is bringing anything new to the table,” said one of the diplomats.

Larijani was low key going into the Vienna meeting, telling reporters, “our logic is the logic of talking and compromising.”

Still, looking ahead to tomorrow’s talks between Larijani and Solana, a western official said there were no indications that Iran was ready to budge on enrichment, despite two sets of UN Security Council sanctions – and the possibility of a third – for its refusal to freeze the activity.

Instead, that meeting, in Lisbon, Portugal, would likely skirt the issue and focus on Tehran’s professed willingness to end its stonewalling of the IAEA on past suspicious activities.

Although Larijani made that pledge at a meeting last month with Solana in Madrid, Spain, there has been no sign Iran is ready to deliver. And even if it did, the move would be unlikely to placate the Security Council, whose main focus is a freeze both of enrichment and of construction of a heavy water reactor that will produce plutonium – like enriched uranium a substance that can be used for the fissile core of nuclear warheads.