U.S., Allies Press Iran for Action at Talks

WSJ, ISTANBUL—The U.S. and other world powers meeting with Iran here this week will press Tehran to take concrete steps to ensure its nuclear activities are peaceful and to justify the continuation of an eight-year diplomatic track that has yielded few gains, American and European officials involved in the negotiations said.

Washington and its European allies specifically want to discuss with Iran the reworking of a year-old proposal that would see President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government ship out a substantial portion of Tehran's stockpile of low-enriched uranium in return for Western energy assistance, according to these officials.

Western diplomats see such a "fuel-swap" deal as limiting Iran's ability to quickly "break out" and produce the weapons-grade fuel required to develop an nuclear bomb. Tehran says its nuclear program is strictly for peaceful purposes.

Representatives from the five permanent United Nations Security Council members—the U.S., China, Russia, France and the U.K.—plus Germany, will also seek to explore with Iran on Friday and Saturday new ways to allow U.N. inspectors greater access to Iran's expanding nuclear infrastructure.

The U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, has voiced growing concerns in recent months that Tehran is constricting its site visits and access to documentation.

"Prospects for exploring a fuel swap will depend on whether Iranians are ready to get serious," said a senior U.S. official involved in the talks. "This is meant as a confidence-building measure to begin to demonstrate that their nuclear program is for peaceful purposes."

The grouping of world powers will be headed by the European Union's foreign-policy chief, Catherine Ashton, while the Iranian side will be led by Tehran's chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili. The U.S. State Department's No. 3 diplomat, William Burns, is leading the U.S. delegation.

This week's talks follow negotiations last month in Geneva between Tehran and the world powers that registered few gains, except for the agreement to hold a second round.

But the U.S. and its allies are coming to Turkey with increasing confidence that economic sanctions imposed against Iran, as well as other overt and covert actions, are slowing Tehran's nuclear work.

Israeli officials stunned the international community this month by announcing that they don't believe Tehran can build a nuclear weapon until 2015. Some senior Israeli officials had proclaimed that an Iranian bomb would be ready within months.

Many Western officials credit a computer worm, known as Stuxnet, with attacking Iran's nuclear-enrichment facility at Natanz and making inoperable thousands of the facility's centrifuges. Neither the U.S. nor Israel has confirmed or denied a role in the cyber attack.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Arab governments last week that Washington believed Tehran's nuclear program was facing mounting "technical" problems.

This dynamic, said U.S. and European officials, gives more time for international diplomacy aimed at ending Iran's nuclear program.

"We've been going through vapid talks with the Iranians for a long time. But now, we have real sanctions and a real strategy in place," said a senior European official. "Tehran won't find that more vapid meetings in Istanbul will allow for any alleviation of the growing economic pressure on them."

Iran, however, is coming to Turkey offering no signs that it is willing to respect Security Council resolutions and suspend its production of nuclear fuel.

On Thursday, Mr. Ahmadinejad said in a televised address that Western powers "tried their best so Iran doesn't become a nuclear nation, but we achieved this goal because there is no turning back the clock."

Tehran is also viewed as having secured a diplomatic victory just by getting the international community to accept Istanbul as the venue for the talks.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has evolved into an important diplomatic friend of Tehran in recent years. Turkey and Brazil were the only two countries on the 15-nation Security Council that voted last year against a fourth round of economic sanctions being imposed against Iran. Mr. Erdogan's diplomatic team initiated its own attempt to secure an energy-assistance package for Tehran, though the U.S. eventually killed the deal after viewing it as too generous.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu hosted a welcome dinner for the participants in the talks Thursday evening. Turkey said Mr. Davutoglu won't sit in on any of the formal talks, but many European officials said they expected Turkey's top diplomat to exert some influence from behind the scenes and confer with Tehran's delegation.

Iran is also coming to Istanbul in a strengthened position regionally. In Lebanon, Tehran's close ally, the militant political party Hezbollah, successfully forced the collapse of the pro-Western government last week, over a dispute tied to a U.N. investigation of the murder of the country's former prime minister, Rafik Hariri. Efforts by Washington's allies in Saudi Arabia and France to mediate the crisis have fizzled. Iran's diplomatic allies—Turkey, Qatar and Syria—are increasingly filling the diplomatic space. Iran has also seen its political allies in Iraq and Afghanistan strengthened. Tehran's diplomatic teamis expected to use the Turkey talks to try to focus as much on these regional issues as Iran's own nuclear work.

Iranian officials have said they were hoping to use the talks to discuss a number of other broader security issues, including counternarcotics, energy collaboration and maritime security.