Nuclear brinkmanship

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in as president of Iran yesterday at a difficult time. It came as an unpleasant surprise in June when this little-known populist hardliner trounced a candidate from the reformist wing of the country's byzantine political scene. Now, just as the former revolutionary guard and mayor of Tehran replaces the pro-reform Mohammad Khatami, comes a potentially fateful moment in the long-running row over Iran's nuclear ambitions. The Islamic Republic insists it has the right to nuclear power generation - though it is blessed with vast reserves of oil and gas. The US and others suspect that its real intention is to secretly develop nuclear weapons.

This explosive issue has been kept under control for two years as Britain, France and Germany, representing the EU, have adopted a carefully calibrated carrot-and-stick approach. They learned the hard way in Iraq that having no policy allows the US to go it alone, so the Europeans have bent over backwards in the face of suspicion and hostility from Washington to ensure diplomacy works.

Now though, with Iran's hawks in the ascendant, a crisis is looming. Appeals by the International Atomic Energy Agency - the UN's nuclear watchdog - have fallen on deaf ears in Tehran, where the authorities insisted again yesterday that they will unilaterally resume the uranium ore conversion they suspended when talks began last year. That would pre-empt delivery of a long-awaited package of EU incentives being unveiled this weekend. The coming days will tell whether this is brinkmanship or an end to negotiations. The stakes are high - though cool nerves are in order, especially given the dismal state of intelligence about Iraqi WMD. The latest US estimate is that Iran is a decade away from making a bomb, very different from what may be a self-serving Israeli view that it is already far closer to that goal.

There is obvious danger in the fact that the nuclear issue is coming to a head so soon after Mr Ahmadinejad's election dashed hopes of advances for reformists and strengthened the baleful influence of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Like other unfree regimes, Iran's thrives on external pressure. The new president has already complained that he is the target of a smear campaign linking him to the occupation of the US embassy in Tehran after Ayatollah Khomeini's 1979 revolution. Mistrust between the two countries still runs deep.

Yet even moderates argue that Iran is entitled to nuclear power, as indeed it is under the terms of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The problem is that it has been caught red-handed cheating in the past. The fact that the five "official" nuclear powers have not met their own disarmament obligations, and that Israel (aided by Britain in the 1950s, as we report today), as well as India and Pakistan all have weapons outside the treaty does not mean Iran should be allowed to follow suit. It has to choose between a road that may lead to UN sanctions and isolation, or the international cooperation, trade and investment needed to feed and employ a young and fast-growing population. If Iran does reject the EU offer, which includes civilian nuclear technology, it will be hard to avoid the conclusion that its true goal is military.

The lesson of Iraq is that engagement with a difficult regime is more likely to encourage change than sanctions and war. Iran, famously part of George Bush's "axis of evil", has behaved with constructive restraint over Iraq and Afghanistan. But its domestic record is lamentable and human rights abuses commonplace. Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer and Nobel prize laureate, insisted yesterday that the gradual social, media and legal advances of recent years must not be reversed. That is a brave and optimistic assertion that will not easily survive a crisis with the west over nuclear weapons.