The United States and France together warned Iran on Friday that if it does not resume negotiations on its nuclear activities, it continues to face the danger of bringing Tehran before the UN Security Council over the issue.

“We have to send a very strong message that clearly there is the course of negotiation … but there is also the course of the Security Council,” Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary of State said after talks in Paris. “It is a course that is available to the international community and it is therefore important that Iran negotiate in good faith,” she said.

A spokesman for French President Jacques Chirac said that he and Condoleezza Rice agreed that “the perspective of an Iran in possession of nuclear weapons is unacceptable.”

Chirac also said that “it is necessary to continue the way of dialogue started by Britain, France and Germany in close cooperation with Russia, in complete openness with the US, and with full respect by Iran of the Paris Accord” of November 2004, the spokesman said.

Rice after meeting with President Jacques Chirac in Paris flew to Moscow for hastily organized talks with President Vladimir Putin on Saturday. Her main focus in both capitals is international attempts to ensure that Iran’s peaceful nuclear energy program is not used to develop nuclear weapons. Moscow is enormously important, because it was Russia who built Iran’s first nuclear reactor for energy and is providing the fuel.