The administration of US President Barack Obama has told Iran it is willing to allow the country to send its stockpile of enriched uranium to any of several nations, including Turkey, for safekeeping, The New York Times reported Monday.
Citing unnamed administration officials and diplomats, the newspaper said the overtures had been made through the International Atomic Energy Agency over the past two weeks.
But all of them have been ignored, the report noted. Instead, the Iranians have revived an old counterproposal that calls for international arms inspectors to take custody of much of Iran?s fuel, but keep it on Kish, a Persian Gulf resort island that is part of Iran.
A senior Obama administration official said that proposal had been rejected because leaving the nuclear material on Iranian territory would allow for the possibility that the Iranians could evict the international inspectors at any moment, the paper said.
That happened in North Korea in 2003, and within months the country had converted its fuel into the material for several nuclear weapons, The Times said.
