NEW YORK – Six major powers meet here Saturday to mull a response to Iran’s nuclear defiance but China is sending a lower-level diplomat in a signal of its reluctance to back tougher sanctions pushed by the West.

Britain, France, Germany, Russia and the United States are sending top officials of their respective foreign ministries at the meeting hosted by the European Union.

The six officials representing the so-called P5+1 were scheduled to meet for a working luncheon at the EU mission in New York, but a diplomat cautioned against expecting any “spectacular” outcome.

Robert Cooper, a senior security adviser representing the EU, was to brief reporters at the end of the closed-door meeting.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced Monday that the six would explore “the kind and degree of sanctions that we should be pursuing” as Iran doggedly refused to comply with UN demands to halt uranium enrichment.

Diplomats said Western members of the group of the five veto-wielding permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany were likely to present their Russian and Chinese colleagues with a range of new and tougher sanctions.

The goal is to crank up the pressure on Iran to accept a UN-brokered deal aimed at allaying suspicions about the nature of its nuclear program by shipping most of its low enriched uranium (LEU) stockpile abroad to be further enriched into reactor fuel.

But Tehran has ignored a U.S.-set December 31 deadline to back the offer, drawn up by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, and countered with its own proposal of a simultaneous and staged swap of LEU with reactor fuel.

Measures said to be under consideration include tougher sanctions targeting Iran’s insurance, financial and arms sectors, diplomats said.

Washington favors sanctions targeting Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, seen as the economic and military backbone of the Iranian regime in a bid to minimize the impact on the Iranian people and avoid an adverse effect on the very people protesting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hardline regime.

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