US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice urged the United Nations today to stand up to Iran, which she said was seeking a nuclear weapons capability that would undermine global security.
Iran's new president was to unveil proposals later in the day intended to allay international suspicions over its nuclear ambitions, with Western powers poised to haul Tehran before the UN Security Council for possible sanctions.
What President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tells the UN General Assembly may determine whether the world nuclear watchdog moves next week to report Iran's secretive atomic program to the highest UN body, diplomats said.
Before he spoke, Ms Rice told the assembly the Security Council should take up the case unless Tehran returned to talks with the European Union and abandoned "its plans for a nuclear weapons capability."
But she omitted harsher anti-Iranian remarks in her prepared text and left the timing of a UN referral pen.
"When diplomacy has been exhausted, the Security Council must become involved," Ms Rice said. Iran swears its program, concealed from the International Atomic Energy Agency for 18 years, is purely for civilian energy purposes.
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned the world in his opening address that the consensus underlying the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was badly frayed while nations pointed fingers at each other rather than working for solutions.
"Yet we face growing risks of proliferation and catastrophic terrorism, and the stakes are too high to continue down a dangerous path of diplomatic brinkmanship," he said.
Iran last month spurned a European package of economic, security and technology incentives for it to abandon sensitive nuclear work and reactivated a factory converting uranium ore into gas, prompting the European Union to break off talks.
Diplomats at IAEA headquarters in Vienna said Ahmadinejad was expected to revive a proposal to turn Iran's uranium enrichment program into an international joint venture, which European countries had rejected in earlier negotiating rounds.
Agencies