US Warns Iran As Nuclear Row Escalates

The White House warned Iran yesterday that it risked a "serious escalation" in its nuclear standoff with the UN and the west after Tehran broke the seals on equipment at its uranium enrichment facility.

Iran's decision to break the seals, installed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, at the underground facility at Natanz, in defiance of a European-brokered agreement for a nuclear freeze, risked triggering international sanctions, the White House's press secretary, Scott McClellan said.

"Any resumption of enrichment and reprocessing activities would be a further violation of Iran's agreement with the Europeans," Mr McClellan said. "So such steps would be a serious escalation of the nuclear issue by Tehran."

The warning came from an administration that has pursued a hard line against Tehran from the early days of George Bush's presidency, when he called Iran part of the "axis of evil". More recently Mr Bush described the conservative Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, as an "odd guy".

Yesterday, the White House warned that action by the security council, for which it has pressed for more than a year, could become inevitable. "If the regime in Iran continues on the current course and fails to abide by its international obligations there is no other choice but to refer the matter to the security council," Mr McClellan said.

Britain, Germany and France were also considering their response with Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, scheduled to meet his European counterparts tomorrow to discuss whether to call an emergency IAEA meeting. Tehran claimed as the seals were broken yesterday that it was seeking to use the enrichment facility for electricity generation, and not to make a bomb. That met with scepticism yesterday in Europe and the US.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the IAEA's chief, told his agency's governing board that Iran intended to begin small scale uranium enrichment, a process which could be used to make a nuclear weapon.