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Negotiators Begin Search for Solution to Iranian Nuclear Issue
(about 9 hours later)
Talks with Iran over a permanent agreement on its nuclear program began on Tuesday in Vienna, but there is little immediate optimism over a negotiation that is expected to last up to a year.
VIENNA — The effort to negotiate a comprehensive solution to the Iranian nuclear issue began in earnest on Tuesday, with Iranian negotiators meeting one on one with officials of the United States and other major world powers.
Even Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on Monday in Tehran that “the nuclear negotiations will lead nowhere,” expressing his well-known mistrust of the motives of the United States and its allies, a mistrust reciprocated in the American Congress. At the same time, the ayatollah said that “Iran will not breach what it has started” and that he supported the negotiating effort, however dismal the prospects for success.
Senior Iranian officials said on Tuesday that they were ready for long and complicated negotiations, but that Iran would not accept the dismantling of its nuclear facilities. Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister and deputy nuclear negotiator, told reporters here that the talks had started well, but that “to us, what has been announced as dismantling Iran’s program and facilities is not on the agenda.”
President Obama is more optimistic, putting the chances at 50 percent. But a failure of these talks would also present both the United States and Iran with more difficult choices, including the possible use of military means, which neither side wants.
There was little substantive news to emerge on the first day of the days of talks, which are intended to arrange an agenda and program to try to resolve all the complicated technical, political, financial and military aspects of Iran’s confrontation with the United Nations Security Council over its nuclear program before the end of July.
The issues for a permanent deal are complex, including the level of Iran’s enrichment of uranium and the fate of the Fordo enrichment plant built deep in a mountain; the country’s reactor at Arak, which will produce plutonium; and its willingness to let international inspectors visit what is suspected of being nuclear-trigger test site at Parchin, a restricted military facility.
To that end, Mr. Araghchi and the American lead negotiator, Wendy R. Sherman, met for 80 minutes, a senior American official said.
Senior Western diplomats involved in the talks say that this round, expected to last three days, will be spent largely trying to determine how to organize the negotiations — including issues surrounding working groups, the level of technical expertise, what to discuss and in what order, and how often to meet.
Tehran insists that its nuclear enrichment has only peaceful aims. The six powers negotiating with it — the United States, France, Britain, Russia and China, the five permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany — want to ensure that Iran’s enrichment is so constrained that it cannot “break out” quickly to produce enough fissile material for a bomb, whether made from uranium or plutonium.
“This is the beginning of what will be a complicated, difficult and lengthy process,” a senior American official said Monday night. “When the stakes are this high, and the devil is truly in the details, one has to take the time to ensure the confidence of the international community in the result.”
That negotiating effort is likely to focus on some equation between the amount and quality of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium and the number and sophistication of the centrifuges it possesses. Iran is thought to have 19,000 centrifuges of varying quality, of which only 10,000 are working. While Iran insists that it has the right to keep developing and installing more sophisticated centrifuges and intends to do so, Western officials will be trying in the talks to come up with an agreement on how many centrifuges, and what kind, can be functioning under international inspection, even if many of the older machines are not destroyed.
Iran and six major powers — the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States) plus Germany, known as the P5-plus-1 group led by Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s foreign policy chief — agreed in November on a six-month, renewable deal limiting Iran’s nuclear program to buy time for these talks.
Under an interim six-month accord, which took effect in January and is designed to buy time for the final settlement talks, Iran committed to not installing any new centrifuges and to limiting its enrichment of uranium to 3.5-percent purity, while turning its current stock of 20-percent enriched uranium into fuel bricks or oxide that cannot easily be further enriched.
The temporary agreement, put in effect in January, obliged Iran to stop enriching uranium to high levels and to severely reduce its stockpile of near-weapons-grade uranium in return for the lifting of some economic sanctions, including access to $4.2 billion in Iranian cash frozen in foreign banks.
Mr. Araghchi told Iranian reporters here that a comprehensive agreement was a “big task, and we have long and complicated negotiations ahead of us.” On Monday, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that “the nuclear negotiations “will lead nowhere,” but that he would not block them.
Though Iran is in breach of Security Council resolutions demanding that it halt enrichment entirely — at least until it comes into full compliance with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations monitor of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty — senior Western officials acknowledge that a final deal would continue to allow Iran to enrich, but only up to a certain level and under strict monitoring.
The six-month accord expires on July 20, with the possibility that both sides will agree to extend it. But a senior American official said that it was important to push to get an agreement sooner rather than later, and that it would be clear by July, in any case, whether Iran is serious about reaching a deal.
Iran denies having any military goals. But its previous level of enrichment, its past efforts to hide enrichment facilities and build them deep into the ground where bombers would have a hard time penetrating, its work on the plutonium-producing reactor and its effort to develop long-range missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead have convinced the West, Israel and Iran’s Arab neighbors that Tehran was seeking nuclear weapons capacity.
The negotiations are intended to ensure that Iran is kept far enough away from achieving that ability that any effort to “break out” and race to construct a nuclear device would be detectable with at least six months’ notice. That is why the negotiations will at some point focus intensively on the number and sophistication of Iran’s centrifuges — the machines that enrich uranium — and how they are inspected.
Senior Western diplomats, including the French, who have deep skepticism about Iran’s intentions, also have said that Iran cannot be allowed to operate the reactor at Arak because it will produce plutonium, another nuclear-bomb fuel.
Last week, Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, said that it might be prepared to make changes to the Arak facility.
The chief American negotiator, Wendy R. Sherman, under secretary of state for political affairs, has said that Iran does not need either the Arak reactor or the underground Fordo site, leading to criticism by Iran’s chief negotiator, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who called her comments “worthless” and said that nuclear technology was not at issue. Iran has also rejected discussing other related topics like its missile program.
The two sides say they want the final-phase talks to last no more than half a year and be finished by the time the interim deal expires on July 20. Senior diplomats believe that the deal will have to be extended. Western officials also say that they do not want to get into a “sausage slicing” negotiation of small steps, but to come to a final agreement that settles all outstanding issues.
As for Ayatollah Khamenei, he said on Monday that even if “the impossible” happened and a comprehensive deal was reached, “everyone must know that America’s enmity is with the core of the Islamic Revolution and with Islam. This enmity will not end with the negotiations.”
