Iran nuclear talks yield no progress, French FM says

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said Friday that six-power talks with Iran being held at the United Nations had failed to yield progress on curbing Tehran’s nuclear program.

“At this time as I speak, there is no significant progress,” Fabius told journalists on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

“We were due to have a meeting this morning of the P5+1 on one side and the Iranians on the other but because of a lack of progress, this meeting (had) to be called off,” Reuters quoted him saying.

Israel, meanwhile, voiced vociferous objections to a reported American proposal to soften its present demands that Iran gut its uranium enrichment program in favor of a new proposal that would allow Tehran to keep nearly half of the project intact while placing other constraints on its possible use as a path to nuclear weapons.

Diplomats who spoke to the Associated Press said the deal envisages letting Iran keep up to 4,500 centrifuges but would reduce the stock of uranium gas fed into the machines to the point where it would take more than a year of enriching to create enough material for a nuclear warhead.

Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz said that Israel “strongly opposes leaving thousands of [uranium] centrifuges active in Iran,” adding that “this deal is reminiscent of the failed deal reached in 2007 with North Korea, which now possesses 10 nuclear warheads.”

The initiative, revealed late Thursday, came after months of nuclear negotiations between Iran and six world powers that have failed to substantially narrow differences over the future size and capacity of Tehran’s uranium enrichment program. Iran insists it does not want atomic arms but the West is only willing to lift nuclear-related sanctions if Tehran agrees to substantially shrink enrichment and other activities that Iran could turn toward making such weapons.

AP and AFP contributed to this report.