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"Unless the U.N. Security Council immediately apologizes, we will have no choice but to take inevitable additional self-defense measures," a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman told the North’s state-run news agency, KCNA. "This will include a nuclear test and a test of a intercontinental ballistic missile."

The spokesman also said North Korea has decided to build new nuclear power plants. "And as the fist step of that process, we will without delay start technological development to secure our own supply of nuclear fuel," he said, referring to its intention to enrich uranium. Engineers use the same technology to produce highly enriched uranium for nuclear bombs.

Pyongyang had earlier accused the Security Council of a "wanton violation of the United Nations charter." It insisted that when it launched its rocket on April 5, it intended to put a communications satellite into orbit, and that it was the first country to be denied a peaceful space program by the United Nations.

But Washington and its allies say the rocket launch was a ruse for testing the North’s latest ballistic missile technology and a violation of the 2006 Security Council resolution. That document was adopted after North Korea tested a ballistic missile in July 2006 and conducted its first nuclear test three months later.

Washington has long suspected North Korea of pursuing a separate program based on enriched uranium. The international agreement to freeze and eventually dismantle the plutonium-based Yongbyon program in return for providing the North with aid and diplomatic recognition faltered last year in a wrangling over how to verify the North’s past atomic activities, especially whether Pyongyang was running a clandestine uranium enrichment program.

SPIEGEL: You are referring to India, Germany, South Africa? Should Iran also be a permanent member of the Security Council? Ahmadinejad: If things were done fairly in the world, Iran would also have to be a member of the Security Council. We do not accept the notion that a handful of countries see themselves as the masters of the world.

Does this mean that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and its director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, can save themselves the trouble of holding talks with Iran? Will uranium enrichment not be discontinued under any circumstances? Ahmadinejad: I believe that they already reached this conclusion in Vienna. Why did we become a member of the IAEA? It was so that we could use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. When a country becomes a member of an international organization, must it only do its homework or is it also entitled to rights? What assistance have we received from the IAEA? Did it provide us with any know-how or knowledge? No. But according to its statutes, it would have been required to do so. Instead, it simply executed instructions coming from America.

We say: We are willing to cooperate under fair conditions. The same conditions, and on a level playing field.

We have no interest in building a nuclear weapon.

The second observation concerns the warmongers and Zionists … SPIEGEL: … your eternal enemy of convenience … Ahmadinejad: …whose existence thrives on tension and who have become rich through war.

Palestinians should be allowed to decide their own future in a free referendum.

the unnatural Zionist state

Do you believe that the German people support the Zionist regime? Do you believe that a referendum could be held in Germany on this question? If you did allow such a referendum to take place, you would discover that the German people hate the Zionist regime.

Ahmadinejad: I do not believe that the European countries would have been as indulgent if only one-hundredth of the crimes that the Zionist regime has committed in Gaza had happened somewhere in Europe. Why on earth do the European governments support this regime?

Ahmadinejad: Allow me to set things straight, both legally and politically. At least 10 members of the UN Security Council… SPIEGEL: …which includes, in addition to the permanent members, US, Russia, Great Britain, France and China, 10 elected representatives based on a rotating principle… Ahmadinejad: …have told us that they only voted against us under American and British pressure. Many have said so in this very room. What value is there to consent under pressure? We consider this to be legally irrelevant. Politically speaking, we believe that this is not the way to run the world. All peoples must be respected, and they must all be granted the same rights.

Earlier in the day, apparently in an attempt to create a semblance of fairness, state television said the Guardian Council had begun a random recount of 10 percent of the ballots in Tehran’s 22 electoral districts and in some provinces.

On Monday, the National Security and Foreign Policy Commission of Parliament was scheduled to visit the holy city of Qum to meet with two grand ayatollahs. A day earlier it met with two former presidents, Mohammad Khatami and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, in an effort to ease the strains that have developed since the June 12 election. The speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, a former nuclear negotiator, has emerged as a powerful opponent of Mr. Ahmadinejad.

The nation’s intelligence chief charged that the protests were inspired by Western and “Zionist” forces, and Mr. Ahmadinejad called Monday for an investigation into the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young protester who became a symbol when a video of her dying moments in the streets was seen all over the world. Witnesses said she was shot by a member of the Basij, the government militia. But now the government is pressing an account that foreigners killed her to undermine its credibility.

On Sunday, the authorities arrested nine Iranian staff members of the British Embassy in Tehran, and while five had been released Monday, four remained in custody for what the intelligence service said were efforts to incite and organize the protests.But as the arrests ratcheted tensions up between Iran and the European Union, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman tried to ease back on Monday, however slightly. “Reduction of ties is not on our agenda with any European country, including Britain,” the spokesman, Hassan Qashqavi, said.

Iran’s economy, even before the electoral crisis, was suffering from the drop in oil prices, with inflation of at least 15 percent — and by some estimates 25 percent — and damaging unemployment. On Sunday, the government announced that it had to end all subsidies for gasoline used by private vehicles, a decision that was expected, but given the timing, suggested serious strains to the state budget. Antagonizing the European Union, Iran’s largest trading partner, could do further damage.

He said the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, on war crimes charges was lamentable because it would undermine Darfur peace talks. A request by the African Union and the Arab League for the Security Council to suspend the indictment for a year should be respected, he said. The indictment “helps to deepen a perception that international justice is racist” because the case is the third to be brought against Africans, Mr. d’Escoto said.

Ruhakana Rugunda, the Ugandan ambassador and a Security Council member, said, “I do not consider that decision racist.”

Mr. d’Escoto supported Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s criticism of the United States for falling about $1 billion behind in its United Nations dues. Describing the United States’ attitude toward the Council, Mr. d’Escoto said, “ ‘You either give me the green light to commit the aggression that I want to commit, or I shall declare you irrelevant.’ ” Mark Kornblau, the spokesman for the United States Mission, said, “It’s hard to make sense of Mr. d’Escoto’s increasingly bizarre statements.”

Mr. d’Escoto tends to draw support from countries at odds with Washington, while Western nations accuse him of being stuck in a leftist, Sandinista mind-set. Mr. d’Escoto, a Roman Catholic priest, was Nicaragua’s foreign minister from 1979 to 1990.

Iranian state radio reports that more than 450 people were arrested during Saturday's rallies, mostly around Tehran's Azadi square.

Forty police officers were also wounded, and 34 government buildings damaged, the Fars news agency reported. 

Mousavi had renewed calls on Sunday for his supporters to continue to protest. In a statement published on the website of his Kalameh newspaper, he said that people had the right to protest against "lies and fraud", but also urged them to show restraint as they take to the streets. "The revolution is your legacy. To protest against lies and fraud is your right. Be hopeful that you will get your right and do not allow others who want to provoke your anger ... to prevail," he said.

He and others said that Israel agreed to the road map and to move ahead with the removal of settlements and soldiers from Gaza in 2005 on the understanding that settlement growth could continue. But a former senior official in the Bush administration disagreed, calling the Israeli characterization “an overstatement.”“There was never an agreement to accept natural growth,” the official said Tuesday, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the matter. “There was an effort to explore what natural growth would mean, but we weren’t able to reach agreement on that.”

The former official said that Bush administration officials had been working with their Israeli counterparts to clarify several issues, including natural growth, government subsidies to settlers, and the cessation of appropriation of Palestinian land. The United States and Israel never reached an agreement, though, either public or private, the official said.

A second senior Bush administration official, also speaking anonymously, said Wednesday: “We talked about a settlement freeze with four elements. One was no new settlements, a second was no new confiscation of Palestinian land, one was no new subsidies and finally, no construction outside the settlements.” He described that fourth condition, which applied to natural growth, as similar to taking a string and tying it around a settlement, and prohibiting any construction outside that string. But, he added, “We had a tentative agreement, but that was contingent on drawing up lines, and this is a process that never got done, therefore the settlement freeze was never formalized and never done.”A third former Bush administration official, Elliott Abrams, who was on the National Security Council staff, wrote an opinion article in The Washington Post in April that seemed to endorse the Israeli argument.

But the Israeli officials complained that Mr. Obama had not accepted that the previous understandings existed. Instead, they lamented, Israel now stood accused of having cheated and dissembled in its settlement activity whereas, in fact, it had largely lived within the guidelines to which both governments had agreed.

On Monday, Mr. Netanyahu said Israel “cannot freeze life in the settlements,” calling the American demand “unreasonable.”

Dov Weissglas, who was a senior aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, wrote an opinion article that appeared Tuesday in Yediot Aharonot, a mass-selling newspaper, laying out the agreements that he said had been reached with officials in the Bush administration.

He said that in May 2003 he and Mr. Sharon met with Mr. Abrams and Stephen J. Hadley of the National Security Council and came up with the definition of settlement freeze: “no new communities were to be built; no Palestinian lands were to be appropriated for settlement purposes; building will not take place beyond the existing community outline; and no ‘settlement encouraging’ budgets were to be allocated.”He said that Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser at the time, signed off on that definition later that month

In April 2004, President Bush presented Mr. Sharon with a letter stating, “In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.” That letter, Mr. Weissglas said, was a result of his earlier negotiations with Bush administration officials acknowledging that certain settlement blocks would remain Israeli and open to continued growth.

The Israeli officials said that no Bush administration official had ever publicly insisted that Israel was obliged to stop all building in the areas it captured in 1967. They said it was important to know that major oral understandings reached between an Israeli prime minister and an American president would not simply be tossed aside when a new administration came into the White House.Of course, Mr. Netanyahu has yet to endorse the two-state solution or even the road map agreed to by previous Israeli governments, which were not oral commitments, but actual signed and public agreements.

Mr. Abrams acknowledged that even within those guidelines, Israel had not fully complied. He wrote: “There has been physical expansion in some places, and the Palestinian Authority is right to object to it. Israeli settlement expansion beyond the security fence, in areas Israel will ultimately evacuate, is a mistake.”

“I’m tired of buying the same horse twice,” Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates said last week while touring an antimissile site in Alaska that the Bush administration built to demonstrate its preparedness to destroy North Korean missiles headed toward the United States. (So far, the North Koreans have not successfully tested a missile of sufficient range to reach the United States, though there is evidence that they may be preparing for another test of their long-range Taepodong-2 missile.)

In France on Saturday, Mr. Obama referred to the same string of broken deals, telling reporters, “I don’t think there should be an assumption that we will simply continue down a path in which North Korea is constantly destabilizing the region and we just react in the same ways.” He added, “We are not intending to continue a policy of rewarding provocation.”

While Mr. Obama was in the Middle East and Europe last week, several senior officials said the president’s national security team had all but set aside the central assumption that guided American policy toward North Korea over the past 16 years and two presidencies: that the North would be willing to ultimately abandon its small arsenal of nuclear weapons in return for some combination of oil, nuclear power plants, money, food and guarantees that the United States would not topple its government, the world’s last Stalinesque regime.

Now, after examining the still-inconclusive evidence about the results of North Korea’s second nuclear test, the administration has come to different conclusions: that Pyonyang’s top priority is to be recognized as a nuclear state, that it is unwilling to bargain away its weapons and that it sees tests as a way to help sell its nuclear technology.

While Mr. Obama is willing to reopen the six-party talks that Mr. Bush began — the other participants are Japan, South Korea, Russia and China — he has no intention, aides say, of offering new incentives to get the North to fulfill agreements from 1994, 2005 and 2008; all were recently renounced.

While some officials privately acknowledged that they would still like to roll back what one called North Korea’s “rudimentary” nuclear capacity, a more realistic goal is to stop the country from devising a small weapon deliverable on a short-, medium- or long-range missile.

In conducting any interdictions, the United States could risk open confrontation with North Korea. That prospect — and the likelihood of escalating conflict if the North resisted an inspection — is why China has balked at American proposals for a resolution by the United Nations Security Council that would explicitly allow interceptions at sea. A previous Security Council resolution, passed after the North’s first nuclear test, in 2006, allowed interdictions “consistent with international law.” But that term was never defined, and few of the provisions were enforced.

North Korea has repeatedly said it would regard any interdiction as an act of war, and officials in Washington have been trying to find ways to stop the shipments without a conflict. Late last week, James B. Steinberg, the deputy secretary of state, visited Beijing with a delegation of American officials, seeking ideas from China about sanctions, including financial pressure, that might force North Korea to change direction.

“The Chinese face a dilemma that they have always faced,” a senior administration official said. “They don’t want North Korea to become a full nuclear weapons state. But they don’t want to cause the state to collapse.”

To counter the Chinese concern, Mr. Steinberg and his delegation argued to the Chinese that failing to crack down on North Korea would prompt reactions that Beijing would find deeply unsettling, including a greater American military presence in the region and more calls in Japan for that country to develop its own weapons.

North Korea’s restoration to the list would be largely symbolic, because it already faces numerous economic sanctions.

Ayatollah Khatami is not regarded as a high-profile figure, so it was not clear how much weight his words carried.

At Friday prayers at Tehran university, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami referred to the demonstrators as rioters and declared, “I want the judiciary to punish leading rioters firmly and without showing any mercy to teach everyone a lesson.” Reuters quoted him as saying demonstrators should be tried for waging war against God. The punishment for such offenses under Islamic law is death, Reuters said.

The authorities have repeatedly dismissed the opposition complaints. In remarks quoted on the official IRNA news agency on Friday , Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, a spokesman for the 12-member Guardian Council charged with vetting elections, said the panel had “almost finished reviewing defeated candidates’ election complaints” which the council said earlier numbered in excess of 600.“The reviews showed that the election was the healthiest since the revolution,” Mr. Kadkhodaei said. “There were no major violations in the election.”

on Friday, at a meeting of foreign ministers from the Group of Eight in Trieste, Italy, a joint statement said they “deployed post-electoral violence which led to the loss of lives of Iranian civilians” and urged Iran to respect human rights, including freedom of expression.” Along with Japan and Russia, the G-8 includes the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Britain.It called on Iran to “guarantee that the will of the Iranian people is reflected in the electoral process” but it said the door must remain open to dialogue with Tehran in its contentious nuclear program, news reports said.

The joint statement was a compromise between some European countries seeking a hard line, and Russia, whose foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, was quoted as telling a news conference in Trieste that while Moscow wanted to express its “most serious concern” over use of force in Iran, “we will not interfere in Iran’s internal affairs.”

In another indication of the depth of divisions that remain, a senior cleric, Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem-Shirazi, called for “national conciliation.” “Definitively, something must be done to ensure that there are no embers burning under the ashes, and that hostilities, antagonism and rivalries are transformed into amity and cooperation among all parties,” he said in comments posted on the state-run Press TV Web site.

Earlier on Tuesday, the opposition was told by Iran's Guardian Council, the legislative body for elections, that the presidential election result would not be annulled. Guardian Council spokesman Abbas Ali Kadkhoda'i said there had been "no major fraud or breach in the election". But Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei later agreed to extend by five days the amount of time allowed to examine complaints of electoral fraud.

Mohsen Rezai, who is a former leader of the Revolutionary Guards, said he had withdrawn his complaints about the vote in the interests of Iran's national security. "I see it as my responsibility to encourage myself and others to control the current situation," Mr Rezai was quoted as saying in a letter to the Guardian Council.

The remaining two candidates have called for the elections to be re-run, amid claims of vote tampering. Opposition candidate Mehdi Karroubi has urged Iranians to mourn for dead protesters on Thursday. His call echoed an earlier one from cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri for three days of national mourning for those killed in the street protests.

Pyongyang's announcement came only hours after the UN imposed sanctions on three companies it said had supported North Korea's controversial rocket launch, as well as updating the list of goods and technologies already banned.

The country is already thought to possess enough reprocessed plutonium for between six and eight nuclear weapons - so in the immediate term the announcement does not significantly alter the strategic balance, our correspondent says.

North Korea had already partially dismantled its nuclear reactor - the source of material for a 2006 atomic test. But it now says it is reprocessing remaining spent fuel rods, which experts say could provide material for at least one more nuclear bomb.

The sanctions mark the first concrete steps against Pyongyang since the UN officially condemned the launch.

North Korea's Deputy UN Ambassador Pak Tok Hun said the decision was "a wanton violation of the United Nations charter". "It is the inalienable right of every nation and country to make peaceful use of outer space," he said. "That is why we totally reject and do not recognise any sort of decision which has been made in the Security Council."

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who has been in Pyongyang in an attempt to persuade the North to return to the nuclear talks, said earlier that sanctions were "not constructive".

The UN Security Council council unanimously condemned North Korea's rocket launch on 13 April, saying it was a cover for a long-range missile test and as such contravened a 2006 resolution banning such tests.

During the presidential campaign of 2005, the supreme leader endorsed Mr. Ahmadinejad because the humble son of a blacksmith appeared to be just such an obscure candidate. But he entered the presidency with a coterie of veterans and ideologues shaped by the Iran-Iraq war who were conservative, religious, largely populist and disdainful of the old guard from the 1979 revolution.

Today, these allies, many of them former midlevel Revolutionary Guard officers in their 50s, run the Interior, Intelligence and Justice Ministries. They also include the commander of the Basij popular militia, the head of the National Security Council and the head of state-run broadcasting. They are aligned with another member of their generation who has emerged as the most important figure in the Khamenei camp, the spiritual leader’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei.

Mr. Ahmadinejad has also changed all 30 of the country’s governors, all the city managers and even third- and fourth-level civil servants in important ministries like the Interior Ministry. It was Interior that announced that Mr. Ahmadinejad had won the June 12 election with just 5 percent of the votes counted, analysts pointed out, and it is the Intelligence Ministry that has been rounding up scores of supporters of the reform candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi, and other dissidents.

At the same time, Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s spiritual mentor, runs three powerful educational institutions in the holy city of Qum, all spun off from the Haqqani seminary, which teaches that Islam and democracy are incompatible. The ayatollah favors a system that would preserve the post of supreme leader and eliminate elections. The Ahmadinejad administration has provided generous government subsidies to the seminary, and its graduates hold significant government posts nationwide.

Perhaps the most important media organization to spread the government’s message is the hard-line Kayhan newspaper. Its general director, Hossein Shariatmaderi, in recent days has resurrected a standard accusation: that foreign governments were manipulating the demonstrations on Iran’s streets.

The special representative for North Korea policy, Stephen W. Bosworth, is a well-regarded diplomat and a former ambassador to South Korea. But he divides his time between this assignment and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he is dean.

Kurt M. Campbell, an Asia security expert nominated to become the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, is likely to play a significant role. But he has not yet been confirmed.

Among the other influential players on North Korea policy, officials said, are James B. Steinberg, deputy secretary of state, and Jeffrey A. Bader, senior director for Asian affairs on the National Security Council.

As news of the missile launch was still being digested across the world, the 15-member UN security council met in closed session in New York to discuss a global response. The US, the UK and France were pushing for strong and united action, including new sanctions, but they faced resistance from the veto-wielding Russia and China, who were expected to block or dilute such moves.

Yukio Takasu, Japan's ambassador to the UN, called the launch "a clear crime". His French equivalent, Jean-Maurice ­Ripert, said: "We expect the council to unanimously condemn what has happened." Even so, the talks were expected to be long and difficult and the session ended early this morning without agreement on a reaction to Pyongyang's move.

"The test represents both a calling card for North Korea to the [US] administration and at the same time strengthens its bargaining position," said Han Sung-joo, a former South Korean foreign minister.

The allies will offer more funds but no more than several thousand new personnel members, according to alliance military planners. Many of those will not be soldiers, but police trainers to meet a central pillar of the president’s new Afghan strategy, which focuses on an expansion of Afghan security forces. But even for the small numbers of European combat reinforcements, check the fine print: Nearly all will be sent to provide security for Afghanistan’s elections this summer, and will not be permanently deployed.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and his British counterpart, John Hutton, have publicly warned that the performance of some European troops demonstrates that NATO risks slipping toward a two-tiered alliance. In that event, it would be divided between those that can and will fight, like Britain, Canada, France and Poland, and those that cannot or will not because of public opinion at home.

In many cases, European capitals have placed severe restrictions on their forces assigned to NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, or I.S.A.F. That has been such a hindrance to the war effort, in the view of some American commanders, that they ruefully say the alliance mission’s initials now stand for “I Saw America Fight.”

"Israel is not on a collision path with the United States," said Lerman in the interview. "The US is still the US; the American people are still pro-Israel, and the foundations of the connection with Israel are strong. It is true that the US has undergone political changes that affect their perceptions and priorities, but, in its deepest essence, nothing has changed in the relationship with Israel."

"Now there is a little friction, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing - as long as these frictions don't penetrate the discussion on defense aid and other subjects at the heart of the relationship. It is still early to know where this disagreement will lead, but I believe it is about to be solved."

Alongside relations with the US administration, Israel has another relationship that is no less important, though often times perceived as trivial and taken for granted – the relationship with American Jewry. The American Jewish community is a very advanced one, very urban, very affluent, and intensely connected to Israel.  Though Israel invests in its relations with the Diaspora, Lerman did not withhold criticism from the upper echelons. "Israel has a problem reflected in its lack of awareness on all sorts topics," explained Lerman. "For instance, the issue of conversion and the relationship with the non-Orthodox denominations of Judaism. In these fields, the Israeli government's continuing perspective is reveals a lack of sensitivity to the deep structure of the Jewish community in North America."

"The despicable treatment of non-Orthodox denominations is a very sore point. If the State of Israel grows darker in its religious interpretations and the Jewish character sharpens into one that American Jewry is uncomfortable with, there is potential for immense alienation," continued Lerman, noting that this is a particularly poignant source of contention given that most American Jews identify with these same non-Orthodox denominations.

Lerman is mainly concerned that North American Jews will stop sending their children to Jewish schools out of financial considerations. "These schools are not entitled to federal aid and are reliant on the purchasing power and donations from the Jewish community, as well as good will because there is nothing stopping a family from sending its children to public school for free," explained Lerman.  "This is a critical struggle because it is about Jewish continuity. The chance that this will stop is more worrisome than mixed marriages, which at least have the potential to expand the Jewish community."

Unusually the resolution was unanimous, reflecting the extent of anger within the Chinese government over last month's nuclear test. Normally it is difficult for the US, Britain and France to persuade China, and to a lesser extent Russia, to take a tough line against North Korea.

The regime is believed to have enough plutonium for at least six nuclear bombs. It has around 8,000 spent fuel rods that if reprocessed could allow the country to harvest 6-8kg of plutonium – enough for at least one nuclear bomb, according to analysts.

The UN resolution authorises all countries to stop and search North Korean ships for weapons. The US, Britain and France wanted to make such inspections mandatory for all states, but China and Russia watered this down. The final resolution "calls on" states to carry out weapons searches.

Even so, the resolution risks standoffs between US and North Korean ships – a danger underlined by North Korea's response. "An attempted blockade of any kind by the US and its followers will be regarded as an act of war and met with a decisive military response," the regime said.

There was no attempt to expand the sanctions to exports and imports of non-military goods. This is partly because China and Russia would have been opposed, but also because of fears a collapse of the North Korean economy would result in a flood of refugees into South Korea.