Should the West provide Iran with reactor fuel in exchange for its uranium stockpile?

FOR NOW, at least, nuclear negotiations between Iran and the West have narrowed to an issue that was not even on the agenda a month ago: Iran's possible export of most of its existing stockpile of enriched uranium to Russia and France, which would turn it into fuel for an Iranian research reactor. This is both a bad and a good development. It is bad because it diverts attention from Iran's continuing refusal to comply with U.N. resolutions ordering it to cease uranium enrichment and from its failure to accept Western proposals even for a temporary freeze. But if Iran goes through with the agreement in principle announced by the Obama administration on Oct. 1, the tangible good would be the removal from Iran of most of the known raw material it could use to make a bomb -- and a probable delay of one to two years in the West's estimates of how quickly it could produce one.