International talks on limiting Iran’s nuclear ambitions snagged Monday on concerns that Tehran’s last-minute demands might thwart agreement on a political framework by Tuesday’s deadline.
Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Abbas Araqchi, told Iranian reporters late Sunday that his country was no longer willing to send its stockpiles of enriched uranium to Russia for storage — a key element in efforts to keep Iran at least a year away from being able to develop a nuclear weapon.
Officials of the P5+1 group — the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China — told reporters at the talks in Lausanne, Switzerland, that the apparent Iranian climbdown was not a deal breaker, but cited three other issues holding up agreement: limits on Iran’s nuclear research and development activities, the timing of the lifting of international sanctions on Iran and how those sanctions might be put back in place if Iran cheats.
“It is time for the P5+1 to make tough decisions and to lift all sanctions,” Araqchi told reporters. “All six U.N. resolutions should be lifted.”
Araqchi’s comments were in response to those by U.S. officials such as White House spokesman Josh Earnest, who said Sunday that “ultimately, it’s time for the Iranians to send a clear signal to the international community about whether or not they’re willing to make the serious commitments required and, basically, live up to their rhetoric that they’re not trying to acquire a nuclear weapon.”
The talks continued Monday under tight security to prevent leaks. But enough information about the outlines of a potential deal has leaked to cause concern among nuclear experts about the ability to verify Iran’s compliance.
Those concerns have centered around reports that international negotiators will not demand full compliance with International Atomic Energy Agency requests for a complete accounting of Iran’s past clandestine nuclear work — something experts say is crucial for proper verification that the program is peaceful — reports that Iran will be allowed to continue to use centrifuges at a previously-secret, heavily fortified facility and whether the time length of an agreement is too short.
The reported outlines of a proposed deal would leave Iran still able to enrich enough uranium for a nuclear bomb within seven to eight months, rather than a year, Olli Heinonen, a former International Atomic Energy Agency deputy director general, wrote in a fact sheet published Saturday by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. That time gets even shorter if the Iranians are able to get away with clandestine enrichment activity, he wrote.
“Iran has talented engineers and the necessary financial resources, and its nuclear infrastructure is much larger than what it actually needs. Therefore, a monitoring scheme that is merely ‘good enough’ will not guarantee success in preventing Iran from breaking out and achieving a nuclear weapons capability,” Heinonen wrote.
