Amid startling but incremental brinkmanship, the talks between Iran and the European Union troika of Britain, France and Germany about Tehran's nuclear ambitions are still alive, just. Just as Iran's reactivation of a mothballed nuclear facility in Isfahan so far only amounts to the initial process of uranium enrichment, so the response of the international community through its nuclear watchdog - the International Atomic Energy Agency - has been a warning, the initial step towards referring Iran to the United Nations Security Council. That just about leaves something to work with.

But the story so far is not promising. Iran originally agreed with the EU3 to suspend enrichment activities, but it has not dispelled suspicions it intends to make atomic weapons or, at the very least, demonstrate its control of the full nuclear fuel cycle as a deterrent to its enemies. It has contemptuously dismissed the EU package of incentives to abandon the latter ambition as paltry.