IRAN yesterday rejected a Russian compromise aimed at ending its nuclear stand-off with the UN and threatened to strangle world oil supplies passing through the Strait of Hormuz.

Tehran’s defiance came as Britain sought to persuade the UN Security Council to set a deadline as soon as 14 days away to comply with international demands to curb its nuclear ambitions.

Diplomats from the UN’s “Permanent Five” powers — Britain, China, France, Russia and the US — are due to meet again in New York today before seeking a Security Council statement later in the week.

Western intelligence experts say that it would probably take Iran between three and five years to build a nuclear weapon if it started now — something Iran denies is its aim. But to inject urgency into the Security Council debate, they now stress that Iran could master the technology to make nuclear weapons in as little as four months.

The Security Council statement being considered would call on Iran to halt construction of its heavy-water reactor and stop uranium enrichment.

But Britain, France and the US, which have taken the hardest line in the past three years of negotiations, fear that other Security Council members will not agree to set a deadline even 30 days away. Britain is adamant, however, that the council should demand compliance within “weeks, not months”.

A senior British official voiced the hope that Security Council measures would provoke a split in the Iranian Government — and public.

“The Iranians have been working for two and a half years to stop this going to the Security Council,” he said. If the Government “is going down a path to cut Iran off from its ties to the Muslim world and to the West, then there would be a debate in the leadership”, he argued.

Russia, meanwhile, is hoping to defuse the growing confrontation by shifting the diplomatic focus away from the UN. Moscow has proposed a meeting of the “Permanent Five” and Germany with Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel prize-winning director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna on March 20. Iran undercut Moscow’s diplomatic gambit yesterday by rejecting its compromise proposal to enrich uranium on Russian territory.

“The Russian proposal is not on our agenda any more,” Hamid Reza Asefi, the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, told reporters in Tehran.

Mostafa Pourmohammadi, the Interior Minister, threatened to use oil as a weapon if the UN imposed sanctions on Iran over its nuclear programme. “If (Security Council members) politicise our nuclear case, we will use any means. We are rich in energy resources. We have control over the biggest and the most sensitive energy route of the world,” he said, referring to the Strait of Hormuz, south of the country.

Konstantin Kosachev, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Russian State Duma, gave warning that the Iranian stance could “radicalise the nature of the United Nations Security Council discussion”.

Times Recommends

• Should Knox’s trial even have reached the courtroom?
• 'Was it real?' The US bailout nightmare
• Iranian opposition plays the long game