Toughest Issues Still Unresolved in Iran Nuclear Talks

NYTimes - with Iran over its disputed nuclear program entered their brinkmanship phase on Friday, with the toughest issues still unresolved a month before the deadline for a final agreement.

Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, told reporters covering the talks in Vienna that the moment had come for the United States and its allies to take a “realistic approach” that recognizes Iran will produce significant amounts of nuclear fuel in coming years.

The senior American negotiator, Wendy R. Sherman, the undersecretary of state for policy, said she doubted whether “Iran is really ready and willing to take all the steps necessary to assure the world” it has no desire or ability to produce a nuclear weapon.

But the two sides showed some indications of progress: Both Mr. Zarif and Ms. Sherman headed home bearing what aides described as a first, tentative draft of a final agreement. The contents were not disclosed, but the aides said many of the hardest issues, including how much capacity Iran would retain to produce enriched uranium, remained in brackets — meaning there was no agreement.

Ms. Sherman said she expected negotiations to resume on July 2 and continue through to the July 20 deadline, “to get this done right, if it can be done.”

In describing the difficulties ahead, both sides also seemed to be positioning themselves in case there was no agreement.

Mr. Zarif said a final agreement could be reached, assuming the United States recognized that its strategy of exerting maximum pressure on Iran was a failure. During the negotiations, American and European officials said, he sought to present himself as flexible, in what they called a likely effort to cast the United States as the intransigent party, should the talks collapse.

That portrayal of the American position, both Western negotiators and outside experts say, could also be part of an Iranian attempt to persuade China and Russia, among others, to cease observing economic sanctions against Iran if it can demonstrate reasonable compromises that were rejected by the United States and Europe.

Ms. Sherman, by contrast, has been consistently more pessimistic, reminding Mr. Zarif and reporters of how far, in the American view, the Iranians need to come. Her biggest political challenge is Congress, where Republicans say they are deeply suspicious that President Obama, seeking any major achievement in foreign policy, will be willing to take a weak accord and describe it as a victory. They say that was the outcome with North Korea — usually omitting that it was George W. Bush, not Mr. Obama, who reached the most recent nuclear dismantlement accords that the North ultimately ignored.

The July 20 deadline was set by a preliminary agreement reached last year in which Iran froze its nuclear program, and diluted some of its most potent uranium fuel, in return for several billion dollars in sanctions relief. The temporary accord allows for a six-month extension in the talks, if Iran and the other nations involved — the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China — agree.
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But even negotiating an extension could be problematic: The Iranians have already indicated that they would want additional sanctions to be lifted, and that would almost certainly meet major objections in Congress. Already some in Congress are pressing for new sanctions, an effort the White House says would subvert any chance to reach an accord.

Over the past few weeks the two sides have reached tentative understandings on reducing the amount of plutonium — a second route to fuel for a bomb — that will be produced by a heavy-water reactor under construction near the town of Arak. There are reports of a possible compromise that would turn a deep underground facility called Fordow, where 3,000 centrifuges are in place, into a “research facility,” a face-saving way for Iran to keep the once-secret facility open, though not producing significant amounts of fuel. Both of those facilities have been visited by international inspectors, who say Iran has honored terms of the temporary accord.

But Iran still insists it must become self-sufficient in fueling its power-reactor at Bushehr, currently running on Russian-provided fuel. Iran also wants to greatly expand its capability to provide fuel for reactors it has not even begun to build, a capacity that could give it the ability to race for a bomb.

Much of the next month will likely be spent negotiating over what is called “breakout,” the capability to rapidly produce at least one weapon’s worth of fuel. Secretary of State John Kerry said in the spring that Iran could do that in two months or so, and that the time must be extended to a year or more. The Iranians, by insisting on far larger numbers of centrifuges, would seem to be shortening their breakout time, though Mr. Zarif has begun to discuss formulas that focus on overall production capacity, rather than the number of centrifuges installed.

Currently the country has 19,000 centrifuges, though only a little more than half are running.

At a briefing, a senior American official seemed open to different ways of calculating Iran’s production capability. The official also said that while the insurgency in Iraq came up on the sidelines of the talks, it was never linked to nuclear progress.