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QUESTION: Madame Secretary, the Iranians launched today a new idea of enriching uranium in Iran with the help of France, an idea that Javier Solana found interesting. And Russia said that they want to solve this issue through negotiation. Are you still confident that all six countries are prepared to act on sanctions during your next P-5+1 meeting which is I suppose in the next few days?

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SECRETARY RICE: Well, as to the matter of Iran, the idea of a consortium is actually an old idea. It has been around for a while and the Iranians have floated it before. There is a consortium idea that the United States supports, which is the consortium that the joint venture that Russia has proposed, which would be a joint venture but with no enrichment and reprocessing on Iranian soil. Because the issue here is that Iran should not be in a position to acquire the technical expertise to enrich and reprocess, which is then the most important step to knowing how to develop a nuclear weapon.

Now if the Iranians have ideas about how to come to a agreement about what they may be able to do in a civil nuclear program, the way to propose this is to suspend enrichment and reprocessing as has been demanded in the Security Council Resolution 1696, and then to come to the table with their ideas. But I fear that this may instead, therefore, be a stalling technique because we don't want to get to the basic issue which is that Iran has to suspend its enrichment and reprocessing in order to begin negotiations.

I just want to underscore, this is not and was never the demand of the United States. This goes all the way back to the Paris agreement. It was put forward in IAEA Board of Governors resolutions. It was then put forward in Security Council Presidential Statement and then Security Council resolutions. So I know that the Iranians would like to make this a test between the United States and Iran. But in fact, there is a Security Council Resolution 1696 that speaks to this and that resolution was adopted without objection.

So I hope that there is still room to resolve this. But the international community is running out of time because soon its own credibility in terms of enforcing its own resolutions will be at -- will be a matter of question.

And if I could just on your second question before we turn to -- I know that the six parties are committed to the logic of Resolution 1696 or they wouldn't have voted for it. And if you read Resolution 1696, it says that if the Iranians are not willing to suspend their enrichment and reprocessing activities, then the Security Council will take appropriate action under Article 41 of Chapter 7, and that's the logic under which we are operating. And we -- you know, we've been at this for quite a long time. The two years of the Paris negotiations, then a year hiatus, then the resolution of July 12th, then the resolution of -- that gave until August 31st.

It's now a month past August 31st. The Iranians have had plenty of time to find a way to suspend their enrichment and reprocessing.

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