BEIJING, Nov. 15 -- Iran confirmed it would not accept a compromise on its disputed nuclear program that involved sensitive uranium enrichment activities being conducted outside the country.

    "Enrichment should be carried out on Iranian soil, as other Iranian officials have said before," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asfi said yesterday.

    That position was spelled out by Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation head Gholamreza Aghazadeh after a meeting with Igor Ivanov, the head of Russia's Security Council.

    Under a proposal reportedly being floated, Iran would be allowed to carry out an initial step in making nuclear fuel ¡ª converting uranium ore into the uranium hexafluoride gas that is the feedstock for making enriched uranium.

    Iran says it only wants to enrich uranium to low levels for atomic reactor fuel and argues such work is a right enshrined by the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

    He also reacted to reports that U.S. intelligence officials had shown IAEA members a stolen Iranian laptop computer containing nuclear designs as proof the country is secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

    The New York Times reported Saturday that during the demonstration, which took place in Vienna in mid-July, officials displayed selections from more than a thousand pages of Iranian computer simulations and accounts of experiments, saying they showed a long effort to design a nuclear warhead.

    "This is worthless and naive. We usually don't carry our secrets around in laptops," Asefi laughed when asked to respond to the report.

    (Source: Shenzhen Daily/Agencies)