Iran threatens to halt flow of oil and speed up nuclear program

Bush and other world leaders believe Tehran wants to make weapons.
WASHINGTON POST
TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran and the United States on Sunday heralded a crucial week of decision-making at the International Atomic Energy Agency by exchanging thinly veiled threats about the consequences of a vote to send the issue of Iran's nuclear program to the U.N. Security Council.
Iran's chief negotiator renewed a threat to interrupt petroleum exports if the IAEA board of governors followed through on its vote last month to report Iran to the Security Council pending a last stab at a diplomatic solution. Iran is the second-largest producer in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
"If we are referred to the Security Council, problems might occur for others as well as us," Larijani said at a news conference. "We would not like to use our oil as a weapon. We would not like to make other countries suffer."
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, in turn warned of "painful consequences" if Iran made good on a separate threat, also repeated Sunday in Tehran, to answer a punitive vote by moving rapidly toward large-scale uranium enrichment. Enriching uranium can produce fuel for civilian power reactors, which is all Iran says its nuclear program is intended for.
The same process, if taken further, can produce fuel for nuclear warheads, which the Bush administration and other skeptics assert is Iran's ultimate goal.
Bolton was speaking at the convention of a pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
President Bush has repeatedly said the possibility of military strikes remains "on the table" even as Washington endorsed an intense international diplomatic effort.
The IAEA meeting has loomed as a showdown since Feb. 4, when the agency's governing panel voted 27 to 3 to discipline Iran for resuming nuclear research, some two years after voluntarily suspending nuclear research amid concerns that the program, because it had been largely secret, was not purely civilian.