"I personally believe we have created conducive ground for such an exchange in the not very distant future," Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told the annual Munich Security Conference on Friday, January 5.

Such a deal could represent a major breakthrough in the long-running dispute over Iran's nuclear program, but it was not clear whether Iran's conditions would be acceptable to the United States and others.

Mottaki said it should be up to Tehran to set the amounts to be exchanged, based on its needs. The uranium swap deal was first discussed last year between Iran and six world powers, which saw it as a way to ensure Tehran did not further enrich its uranium to a level that would be potentially usable in a nuclear bomb.

But Tehran, which denies any bomb-making intentions, had failed to respond positively to the proposal from the group - the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany -until this week.

Mottaki said he would discuss the exchange on Saturday with the new head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Yukiya Amano, on the fringes of the Munich conference.

"We think all parties have shown their political will to fulfill this exchange," he said, without naming specific countries.

bk/Reuters/dpa

Editor: Toma Tasovac