MOSCOW — In a bid to increase pressure on Iran and North Korea to abandon their nuclear ambitions, U.S. Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton met here Monday with key Russian officials to seek additional help.
The consultations preceded a series of summits and other meetings that could lead to U.N. Security Council consideration of Iran's alleged failure to live up to the country's nuclear commitments, Bolton said at a news conference. The issue of North Korea's nuclear weapons program already has gone to the council.
The summits include a meeting in St. Petersburg between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir V. Putin at the end of May and a summit of the Group of 8 major industrialized nations in France in early June, Bolton said.
The International Atomic Energy Agency board will consider the Iran issue at a mid-June meeting in Vienna. From there, it could go to the Security Council, Bolton said, implying that Washington wants Moscow's support for such action. Discussion at the Vienna meeting will focus in part on the IAEA's confirmation that Iran possesses centrifuges capable of producing weapons-grade uranium, he said.
"President Putin and President Bush have already agreed ... that it is neither in Russia's interest nor in America's interest to have a nuclear weapons-capable Iran," Bolton said. The reasons for Russia's growing concern "should be obvious," he added, because Iran also is developing ballistic missiles and "here in Moscow we're a lot closer to Iran than I am when I go back to Washington."
Moscow's position on Iran's nuclear program is critical because Russia has helped Iran construct a nearly completed 1,000-megawatt, light-water reactor in the western port of Bushehr and has considered additional nuclear power projects.
The United States believes that the Bushehr project, estimated to cost $800 million, is a cover for obtaining sensitive technologies to develop nuclear weapons. Washington also suspects that Russian scientists, without government approval, are helping the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program, and it wants Moscow to crack down vigorously on such activity.
In recent months, Russian officials have begun to back away from their previous insistence that Iran's nuclear program is entirely peaceful.
Moscow has also expressed growing concern about North Korea's diplomatic brinkmanship, particularly its recent withdrawal from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
