Drafting comprehensive Iran nuclear deal 'could start next month'
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Version 0 of 1. As Iranian negotiators sat down in Vienna today with representatives of six major powers in Vienna, the head of the country's delegation, foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif suggested that the negotiations are going well enough for all sides to start drafting a comprehensive nuclear deal as early as the next round, in May. Under the interim accord signed in November in Geneva, which went into effect in January, the parties are supposed to complete the negotiations by July 20, though this is not a hard and fast deadline. If drafting does indeed begin this month, the talks would be on the right trajectory, but as Zarif pointed out on a Facebook posting today, the drafting will be "a complicated, difficult and slow process." There are a lot of moving parts. The deal would have to be an enduring resolution to the 12-year standoff on Iran's nuclear programme, lifting sanctions wholesale in return for permanent limits on the capacity and direction of the programme to ensure it could not be used covertly to build a warhead. Those constraints would apply to the number of centrifuges Iran uses to enrich uranium, the level of that enrichment, the status of an underground enrichment plant at Fordow, near Qom, and the future of a heavy water reactor near Arak. Arak could be one of the toughest issues. The six-power group wanted it scrapped because of its capacity to produce plutonium as a by-product, offering instead a light-water reactor, which would be much less of a proliferation risk. Iran is not prepared to junk such an expensive and prestigious project which Tehran says is essential for the production of medical and research isotopes. A group of Princeton academics have produced a paper for Arms Control Today ($) suggesting ways of converting Arak's design for a "win-win solution". Ali Ahmad, Frank von Hippel, Alexander Glaser and Zia Man, argue that if low-enriched uranium is used in the reactor rather than natural uranium, it would produce less than a kilogram of plutonium a year, rather than the roughly 8kg (one bomb's worth) under the existing design. The plutonium could be removed periodically to eliminate the residual proliferation concern, the Princeton paper argues. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Zarif's deputy, Majid Ravanchi, seemed to signal that Iran was open to such a compromise that would address 'legitimate concerns' about Arak. There are still external shocks that could derail the talks, such as a disastrous rift between the West and Moscow over Ukraine, but the mood music from Vienna reflects a very real desire to resolve the nuclear issue one and fall in the coming months. |