Iran Nuclear Negotiations Hit Fresh Hurdle

WSJ

Nuclear negotiations between Iran and six major powers hit a fresh hurdle this week, with the country's Supreme Leader saying that Iran needs significantly greater enrichment capacity.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's comment in a speech Monday to senior level technocrats and military personnel came as negotiators in Vienna struggle to complete a final nuclear agreement by the looming July 20 deadline. Western diplomats have said that progress in those talks has been very slow.

The talks aim to win commitments from Iran to limit its future program in exchange for a gradual end to international sanctions. Western officials have said that if Iran insists on demanding a bigger program that would be a deal-breaker.

While a U.S. official said Tuesday they are focused on what the Iran's diplomats say around the negotiating table, the comments by Mr. Khamenei, widely considered to be the final arbiter of Iran's nuclear policy, could box in the Iranian team's room to maneuver.

Mr. Khamenei has repeatedly commented on the negotiations in broad terms, signaling that he supports the talks even though he wasn't optimistic about their success. It has never been clear whether he has set a red line for his negotiating team to stop them accepting significant reductions in Iran's nuclear program. Monday's remarks were his most specific so far on that key issue.

According to a text of his remarks on his official website, Mr. Khamenei said the six powers were demanding Iran accept an enrichment limit of 10,000 separative work units, or SWU, though they have never publicly named a number. One SWU very roughly equals the amount of enrichment one basic centrifuge can carry out in a year.

"Their goal on the subject of enrichment capacity is to convince Iran to enrich 10,000 SWU. They first started off with 500 and 1,000 SWU," he said. "Officials tell me that the country's definite need is 190,000 SWU."

While Mr. Khamenei's speech was widely quoted in Iranian media, the comments about the 190,000 SWUs weren't, suggesting this may not be a major new policy shift.

Karim Sadjadpour, senior associate at Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that the 190,000 SWU figure "is perhaps 10 times more than the U.S. would be willing to countenance in the next decade. That is certainly not a bridgeable gap in the next two weeks, nor even in the next six months."

Mr. Khamenei's statement may have been aimed at "preparing the terrain" for the possibility that the talks fail, said Dina Esfandiary, a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

"But it is a risky move because he is also boxing in the negotiators and making it more difficult for them to accept lower numbers," she said.

A number of Western experts have said that to assure the international community that Iran won't be able to race out and suddenly produce enough nuclear fuel for an atomic bomb, Iran must accept a limit of anywhere between 2,000 and 6,000 old-generation centrifuges.

Though Western officials haven't named a ceiling publicly, a senior administration official said last week that Tehran would have to accept a program which was "very limited" under a final agreement and "a fraction" of Iran's current capabilities.

Iran currently has some 19,000 centrifuges, of which around 10,000 are in operation. Some 1,000 of those centrifuges are more advanced machines with a significantly higher enrichment capacity.

Iran is negotiating with the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—China, the U.S., the U.K., France and Russia—plus Germany. Iran denies it has ever sought to develop nuclear weapons, saying it needs nuclear capabilities for energy and medical isotopes.

Over the past week, Washington has sought to raise the heat on Iran in the talks, with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry writing last Tuesday that "now" was the time for Iran to choose whether to keep its nuclear options open or to seek a diplomatic route that would see sanctions ended.

Mr. Kerry warned that the U.S. may not accept extending the talks beyond the July 20 target date if real progress wasn't made in the talks.

"What matters is what happens inside the negotiating room, and we are still looking for Iran to make the choices it must to ensure the international community that its program is for entirely peaceful purposes and cannot be used for a nuclear weapon," a senior U.S. administration said Tuesday in response to Mr. Khamenei's remarks.

On Tuesday, Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, who is Tehran's point man in the negotiations, said the backing of the Supreme Leader is Iran's "biggest support" and promised the team won't "back down" on any of Iran's nuclear rights.

Write to Laurence Norman at [email protected] and Farnaz Fassihi at [email protected]