Khazar Ibragim, a spokesman for Azerbaijan's Interior Ministry, said the convoy of trucks carrying the shipment, sent from Russia's Atomstroyexport, the contractor building the Bushehr facility, was detained in Astara, on the Azerbaijani-Iranian border, in order to ensure the cargo's content didn't breach U.N. sanctions.

"There are certain U.N. Security Council resolutions against Iran in place, and we want to know whether the cargo complies with the resolutions," he said. "Which is why we requested that the Russian side specify the content of the cargo."

Moscow demanded Azerbaijan explain itself, but as of April 23 Atomstroyexport spokeswoman Irina Iesipova said there had been no progress in resolving the standoff. In siding with the United Nations, Azerbaijan has managed to antagonize both Iran and Russia.

In Moscow, Russian Federation Council Sen. Vladimir Zhidkikh, a member of the council's subcommittee for nuclear power, said that while "the detainment of our cargo already for 25 days can be called a misunderstanding," the load's retention by Azeri customs officials is typical behavior by "low ranking" corrupt officials designed to enrich themselves or gain promotion.

Zhidkikh said he hoped the situation would soon be resolved as Russia had not violated international law but was fulfilling its commitments in line with U.N. sanctions.

"The Bushehr nuclear power plant is an important atomic project of the Iranian nuclear program and therefore the U.N. Security Council must not become the object of political speculation," he said. "Time and the professional behavior of specialists responsible for Russia's participation in construction in this project will be evident to everyone."

For the moment, Iran is willing to resort to diplomacy to get the cargo freed.

"The seizure by Baku of equipment for the NPP en route from Russia to Iran is a matter of customs procedure; it's a technical problem," said Naser Hamidi, Iran's ambassador to Baku.

An Iranian official close to the issue said it was Atomstroyexport's responsibility to resolve the problem.

An Atomstroyexport spokesman said the cargo was not a dual-purpose product or nuclear material, but rather thermal-insulating equipment.

"The shipment was registered in line with all accepted international practical regulations," he said.

The 915 megawatt VVER-1000 PWR Bushehr reactor, costing an estimated $1 billion to $2 billion, has become a bone of contention for both the Bush administration and Israel, which argue a country awash in oil is using Bushehr and its enrichment program covertly to develop nuclear weapons. Tehran denies the charge, maintaining it is looking past a period when its "peak oil" exports decline. Since the beginning of the year, thinly veiled talk about a possible Israeli or U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities has increased, further ratcheting up regional tensions.

In fact, electrical demand in Iran is increasing 8 percent annually, leading the government to seek to expand the country's generating capacity from 33,000 to 53,000 megawatts in 2010. Focusing Washington's concern is that the 2010 expansion program includes electricity generated by the Bushehr nuclear reactor, which is intended to be the first of a series of Iranian nuclear power stations. Far from merely generating electricity from nuclear energy, Iran has announced its intention to become self-sufficient in the production of enriched uranium to fuel its projected nuclear power stations, and stated that it has mastered the technical complexities of uranium enrichment. Further fueling the flames, earlier this month President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after stressing Iran's legal right to nuclear energy for power production, announced after inspecting the Natanz nuclear site in Isfahan that Iran had started installing 6,000 new centrifuges for uranium enrichment.

The dispute is more than a tempest in a teacup; because of Iranian intransigence in cooperating with U.N. requests for detailed information on its nuclear program, the U.N. Security Council has imposed three sets of increasingly stringent sanctions on Tehran over its lack of cooperation. The most recent resolution, passed on March 4, froze accounts of targeted Iranian companies and banks and introduced inspections for goods leaving and entering the Islamic republic. Baku bases its actions on the March 4 resolution.

The Bushehr issue has assumed prominence since Jan. 28 when Russia delivered its eighth and final enriched uranium of 82 metric tons. Heightening international concerns, Iran hopes Bushehr, its first nuclear power plant, will become operational in October.

It seems likely that Atomstroyexport's cargo, if it is truly insulation, will eventually be released for its onward journey.

The shipment is hardly the end of the Bushehr saga, however. In an ominous indication of Baku's official thinking on Iran's nuclear intentions and possible U.S.-Israeli reaction, on April 25 Azeri President Ilham Aliyev directed the Ministry of Emergency Situations to establish a new national agency charged with overseeing nuclear and radiological activity. The Cabinet has been instructed to prepare the new agency's regulations within a month for submission to the president. Given that earlier this month Israel conducted its biggest-ever civil defense exercise, Turning Point 2, and the Saudi paper Okaz reported that Saudi Arabia is preparing "national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the Kingdom following experts' warnings of possible attacks on Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactors," it would seem that Iran's neighbors are increasingly preparing for worst-case scenarios far beyond the radiation already blowing about the Middle East from depleted uranium munitions used in Iraq.

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