The US and Iran are to hold their first face-to-face talks in three decades after the European Union struck a deal to resume nuclear negotiations.

Iranian officials and representatives of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany will meet on October 1 after Washington accepted proposals from Tehran as the basis for new talks. It will be the first time in a year that Iran has met representatives of the six leading world powers and the first time that the US has sent its officials in person.

The talks, the first between the two nations since the severing of diplomatic relations in 1980, are a last-ditch effort to engage Iran diplomatically. Tehran has repeatedly refused to halt uranium enrichment or negotiate its “nuclear rights”. Western officials indicated last week that the diplomatic track was all but exhausted and that the groundwork was being prepared for new sanctions.

With Russia unwilling to back tough sanctions on the Iranian energy sector, however, Washington agreed to the talks to test Tehran’s seriousness about dialogue.

The venue is yet to be decided but Western leaders will meet at the UN General Assembly next week to thrash out the agenda. The talks will be conducted by low-ranking government officials.

Hopes of a breakthrough remain low. The five-page proposal submitted by Tehran last week was long on rhetoric about global peace and brotherhood and low on detail about its nuclear programme.

Washington expressed disappointment, saying that it was “not really responsive to our greatest concern”. Moscow, however, said that the proposal had offered “something to dig into”.

Western diplomats said that Tehran’s emphasis on global non-proliferation was a thinly veiled reference to Israel’s covert nuclear arsenal and a distraction from the real issue — Iran’s failure to give assurances over the peaceful nature of its nuclear programme.

Hassan Ghashghavi, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, said that Iran was trying to address those fears. “As you saw, one of the objectives of the package is to certainly remove the concern about the nuclear issue by focusing on global disarmament and implementing a slogan that nuclear energy is for everyone but atomic bomb for no-one,” he said.

Tehran claims that its nuclear programme is for civilian energy generation only but refuses to address the specific allegations of weaponisation research, dismissing intelligence as “fabricated”. The chief of the UN atomic watchdog said last week that the agency had reached a stalemate with Tehran over its continued evasions.

The European Union’s Swedish presidency said on Monday that the outcome of the talks should be awaited before weighing any threat of future sanctions. “The focus now should be on that particular meeting,” Carl Bildt, the Foreign Minister, said. “Exactly what will happen after that is somewhat dependent on what happens in the talks.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6834512.ece