CAIRO, Egypt — Egypt's president announced plans Monday to build several nuclear power plants, the latest in a string of such ambitious proposals from moderate Arab countries.
The United States immediately welcomed the plan, in a sharp contrast to what it called nuclear "cheating" by Iran.
President Hosni Mubarak said the aim was to diversify Egypt's energy resources and preserve its oil and gas reserves for future generations. In a televised speech, he pledged that Egypt would work with the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency at all times and would not seek a nuclear bomb.
But Mubarak also made clear there were strategic reasons for the program, calling secure sources of energy "an integral part of Egypt's national security system."
In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States would not object to the program as long as Egypt adhered to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and International Atomic Energy Agency guidelines.
"The problem has arisen, specifically in the case of Iran, where you have a country that has made certain commitments, and in our view and the shared view of many ... [is] cheating on those obligations," he said.
"For those states who want to pursue peaceful nuclear energy ... that's not a problem for us," McCormack said. "Thoseare countries that we can work with."
The United States accuses Iran of using the cover of a peaceful nuclear program to secretly work toward building a bomb, an allegation Iran denies. Iran asserts it has a right to peaceful nuclear power and needs it to meet its economy's voracious energy needs.
Iran's program has prompted a slew of Mideast countries to announce plans of their own - in part simply to blunt Tehran's rising regional influence.
"A lot of this is political and strategic," said Jon Wolfsthal, a nonproliferation expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
Egypt is highly sensitive to the fact that Iran hopes to open its Bushehr nuclear plant next year, said Mohamed Abdel-Salam, director of the regional security program at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.
"[Iran's] regional role, as well as Iran's political use of the nuclear issue, have added to Egypt's sensitivity," he said. Other Arab countries' recent nuclear announcements "added extra pressure on Egypt not to delay any more."
Jordan, Turkey and several Gulf Arab countries have announced in recent months that they are interested in developing nuclear power programs, and Yemen's government signed a deal with a U.S. company in September to build civilian nuclear plants over the next 10 years.
Algeria also signed a cooperation accord with the United States on civil nuclear energy in June, and Morocco announced a deal last week under which France will help develop nuclear reactors there.
Despite the declarations of peaceful intentions, there are worries the countries could be taking the first steps toward a dangerous proliferation in the volatile Mideast.
Such fears intensified when Israel launched a Sept. 6 airstrike against Syria, a country allied with Iran that the United States accuses of supporting terrorism.
U.S. officials have been quoted in news reports as saying the strike targeted a North Korean-style structure that could have been used for the start of a nuclear reactor.
Syria denies that it has a secret nuclear program and says the building was an unused military facility.
Israel has not officially commented on the raid or acknowledged carrying it out.
But Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the U.N. watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, this weekend criticized Israel and the U.S. for failing to provide the agency with any evidence backing up the claim of a Syrian nuclear program.
Following a policy it calls "nuclear ambiguity," Israel has never confirmed nor denied having a nuclear weapons program itself.
Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at an Israeli nuclear plant, spent 18 years in prison after giving details of the country's atomic program to a British newspaper in 1986. His information led many outside experts to conclude that Israel has the world's sixth-largest stockpile of nuclear weapons.
Egypt first announced a year ago that it was seeking to restart a nuclear program that was publicly shelved in the aftermath of the 1986 accident at the Soviet nuclear plant in Chernobyl.
Mubarak offered no timetable Monday, but a year ago, Hassan Yunis, the minister of electricity and energy, said Egypt could have an operational nuclear power plant within 10 years.
Egypt has conducted nuclear experiments for research purposes on a very small scale for the past four decades, at a reactor northeast of Cairo, but it has not included the key process of uranium enrichment, the International Atomic Energy Agency says.
Abdel-Salam said Egypt has extensively studied a site for a plant, at El-Dabaa on the Mediterranean coast west of Alexandria, and predicted a facility could be built within three years.
Outside experts were more conservative, with Wolfsthal saying a decade or longer was more likely. Egypt will almost certainly have to rely on extensive foreign help to build a plant, he said.
Meanwhile, senior officials from Iran and the U.N. nuclear watchdog began a final round of talks Monday aimed at resolving remaining questions on Iranian centrifuges that are used to enrich uranium.
The Tehran talks are critical because they will provide the basis for a progress report on Iran by ElBaradei planned for mid-November.
"In this new round of talks, we hope we'll be able to conclude our negotiations," Iranian state television quoted Mohammad Saeedi, deputy head of the country's Atomic Energy Organization, as saying.
The discussions are the latest attempt by the International Atomic Energy Agency to address outstanding questions on the Iranian program.
The agency's deputy chief, Olli Heinonen, heads the U.N. delegation, while Iran's is led by Javad Vaeedi from the Supreme National Security Council, a security decision-making body that handles Iran's nuclear talks with the outside world.
Saeedi said the two previous rounds of talks with the U.N. agency were "comprehensive" and also "frank and explicit." He said Tehran was prepared to answer remaining questions to "close the file" on its centrifuge technology.
Heinonen said Iran has provided "good cooperation" with the U.N. agency in clearing up ambiguities over Tehran's centrifuge technology.
Neither official provided details.
Centrifuges are used in enriching uranium, a process that can produce either fuel for a nuclear reactor or the material for a warhead.
In speaking to the U.N. General Assembly on Monday, El-Baradei stressed that "Iran's cooperation and transparency are key" to his report on Iran's nuclear program.
If Iran answers all outstanding questions, and the International Atomic Energy Agency can verify that Iran's program is peaceful, ElBaradei said that "could create the conditions for a comprehensive and durable solution."Information for this article was contributed by Anna Johnson, Nadia abou el-Magd, Ali Akbar Dareini and Edith Lederer of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1, 3 on 10/30/2007