Vienna, Austria ? After months of fruitless negotiations, European nations set the stage Wednesday for reporting Iran to the powerful U.N. Security Council by the end of the week because of concerns the Islamic country’s nuclear program is not “exclusively for peaceful purposes.”

Iran remained defiant, warning such action will provoke it into doing exactly what the world wants it to renounce – starting full-scale uranium enrichment, a possible pathway to nuclear weapons.

Positions appeared to be hardening on the eve of an International Atomic Energy Agency meeting after European nations formally submitted a U.S.-backed motion for the IAEA’s 35-nation board to refer Iran to the Security Council. The two-day board meeting was to start today.

“Nuclear energy is our right, and we will resist until this right is fully realized,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told a crowd of thousands in the southern Iran city of Bushehr, site of a Russian-built power plant. “Our nation can’t give in to the coercion of some bully countries who imagine they are the whole world.”

Speaking a day after President Bush declared in his State of the Union address that “the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons,” Ahmadinejad derided the United States as a “hollow superpower” and vowed to pursue the nuclear program.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, center, listens to Asadollah Sabouri, left, deputy head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, on Wednesday as he visits Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant.

The IAEA board was expected to approve the motion easily because Russia and China – which both have veto power on the Security Council – now support reporting Iran following months of opposition.

“Iran will find itself before the Security Council,” State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in Washington. “Iran is working to develop a nuclear weapon.”

The developments were a boost to the United States, the main proponent of referral. Washington has waited years for international suspicions of Iran’s nuclear ambitions to translate into support among board nations.

Iran’s decision Jan. 10 to restart small-scale uranium enrichment – and Ahmadinejad’s calls for Israel to be wiped off the map – apparently rattled Beijing and Moscow. Iran became more insistent on its right to pursue a nuclear program and less cooperative in talks with European negotiators after the election of the hard-line Ahmadinejad last June.

The call for referral was contained in a confidential resolution obtained by The Associated Press. It “requests the director general to report to the Security Council” on steps Iran needs to take to dispel international suspicion it could be seeking to make nuclear arms.

If the board approves referral as expected, it will launch a protracted process that could end in Security Council sanctions for Tehran.