The view from Tehran and Moscow.

• Position: Contra Iran - Interview

From the interview of UN Ambassador Favad Zarif, the ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations, in National Interest online (www.nationalinterest.org).

IRAN IS always ready for dialogue. We have to see whether tactics followed by one or another side of this dialogue in fact help the dialogue or creates obstacles. But I can tell you that from the beginning of the negotiations between Iran and Europe, the Security Council was used as a threat, so the dialogue could only have one outcome.

If one party in a discussion is always confident that it can resort to an extremist instrument with the dialogue, then the propensity to do whatever is possible and useful in order to achieve a mutually acceptable solution becomes more distant.

That is why I say the resolution impedes dialogue because it gives an artificial mechanism. The Security Council sanctions will not be able to stop the Iranian program. The sanctions that are requested will not satisfy proliferation concerns. Proliferation concerns--if there are any real, sincere proliferation concerns--can be addressed through mechanisms that would bring about transparency, international monitoring and other possibilities that would provide the assurance that Iran's program will always remain peaceful. The Security Council can impose sanctions, but that does not provide that assurance....

Because Iran has been denied technology over the last 27 years ... Iran has had to be discreet in its acquisitions of peaceful nuclear technology to the point that today Iran's nuclear program has been localized. Every element of that program is produced locally and our own scientists have developed the scientific know-how in order to be able to sustain the program without any external support.

That was not always the case. Our desire was to have international cooperation in order to have access to technology. But the option that was provided to Iran throughout the past 27 years--and now more officially in this resolution--is to either accept being deprived of this technology-which is assuming greater and greater significance--or to try to develop it based on our own. Between these two options, we certainly choose the latter.

If the option were to be provided to Iran to develop this technology through cooperation, that is what we have suggested, an international consortium: other countries, including Western countries, could own...