Tehran, May 9 (DPA) Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday that, following his letter to American President George W. Bush, the ball now lay in the US court with regard to Iran's nuclear programme.
"We are waiting to see how the Americans will react as it is now up to them to decide how to proceed, we have no problems in deciding," Ahmadinejad said on state television before leaving for a state visit to Indonesia.
He did not elaborate about the letter sent the day before to the White House leader.
He said in keeping with "Islamic ethics", Iran would not disclose the contents of the letter before the Americans did.
"All I can say about the contents is that the letter contains the standpoints of the Iranian nation on global affairs and offers solutions on how to settle the problems currently agonising the world," Ahmadinejad said.
Meanwhile the spokesman for Iran's National Security Council, Hossein Entezami, said Tuesday that Tehran's withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was not on Iran's agenda.
Entezami told Fars news agency that Iran considers the NPT to be a good treaty but blamed the West of following a double standard in the implementation of the treaty.
He said that if the Iranian case returned from the UN Security Council to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), then a suitable timetable could enable an agreement acceptable to both sides.
Entezami said that, as an IAEA member, Iran wanted its nuclear activities to be acknowledged and would in return remove all ambiguities by starting a consortium for joint uranium enrichment and resuming large-scale IAEA inspections.
Foreign Ministry Spokesman Hamid-Reza Assefi said he considered the initial reaction in Washington to Ahmadinejad's letter as irrelevant.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had said the letter contained "nothing important for the nuclear talks".
State television quoted Assefi as saying that the letter was not supposed to raise the nuclear dispute "as Iran has enough international legal backing for pursuing its nuclear programmes without needing to mention this issue in the letter (to Bush)".
--DPA