Iran said today it would resume uranium enrichment-related activities within days, a move the United States and the European Union have warned would see its nuclear case escalated to the UN Security Council.
"We will lift the first stage of our suspension, which is that of our UCF (Uranium Conversion Facility) project in Isfahan, in the next few days," Mohammad Saeedi, deputy head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation, told a university conference, the official IRNA news agency reported.
The Isfahan plant is used to convert raw uranium into a gas that can be fed into enrichment centrifuges for purification into a fuel that can be used in nuclear power reactors or, if purified further, into bomb-grade material.
Iran strongly denies US accusations it is trying to build atomic weapons and says its nuclear facilities will only be used as part of a civilian energy programme.
Iran suspended all nuclear fuel production and reprocessing in November as a trust-building measure while it tried to negotiate an agreement on the future of its nuclear activities with the EU.
Mr Saeedi said Tehran would resume uranium enrichment itself if the EU failed to heed its proposals on a long-term solution to its nuclear standoff with the West. "There is no justification now to continue the suspension, but to show our goodwill, we are not resuming our activities all of a sudden," he said.
"If the Europeans in the next stages of negotiations do not pay attention to our proposals, we will resume uranium enrichment as well," he added.