Zarif: diplomacy the only way to solve nuclear tangle

Ahead of the resumption of talks between Iran and six world powers over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme, Iran’s deputy foreign minister said on Saturday his country saw no alternative to a diplomatic settlement and believed both sides were resolved to reach one.

The deadline for a deal over Iran’s nuclear programmes is 24 November. Talks – the full version of which involve Iran, the UK, Germany, France, the US, China and Russia – will resume in Oman on Sunday. Foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, European Union envoy Catherine Ashton and US secretary of state John Kerry will attend, before a full resumption of talks in Vienna on 18 November.

“No middle solutions exist and all our thoughts are focused on how to reach a settlement,” Abbas Araghchi, deputy foreign minister and Iran’s chief negotiatior, told the state news agency IRNA.

“No one wants to return to the way things were before the Geneva agreement. That would be too risky a scenario,” he said, referring to the preliminary accord reached a year ago under which Iran has curbed some sensitive nuclear activity in exchange for limited relief from international sanctions.

However, an influential US thinktank said on Saturday that Iran may have violated last year’s interim agreement by stepping up efforts to develop a machine that could enrich uranium much faster.

In Beijing, on the sidelines of an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum meeting, Kerry said there was no link between nuclear talks and the US-led fight against Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, and refused to comment on a letter reportedly sent by President Obama to Iran’s religious and political leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, suggesting that diplomacy over the nuclear issue might presage a broader rapprochement.

The letter, written in October and reported by the Wall Street Journal, reportedly referenced a shared interest between the US and Iran in combating Isis militants.

“The nuclear negotiations are on their own, they’re standing separate from anything else, and no discussion has ever taken place about linking one thing to another,” Kerry told reporters.

“I’m confident I’m aware of what the president has been doing and saying with respect to this issue.”

Kerry said on Wednesday that negotiations would get more difficult if the 24 November deadline were missed, and the powers were not – for now – weighing any extension to the talks. His remarks seemed aimed in part at raising the pressure on Tehran to agree to the deal, which would include tougher United Nations inspections to verify Iran is complying with its provisions.

A decade-long standoff over western suspicions that Iran has covertly sought to develop the means to build nuclear weapons – something it denies – has raised the risk of a wider war in the turbulent Middle East.

“Both sides are aware of this, which is why I think a deal is within reach. We are serious and I can see the same resolve on the other side,” Araghchi was quoted by IRNA as saying.

The stickiest unresolved issues are Iran’s overall uranium enrichment capacity, the length of any long-term agreement and the pace at which international sanctions would be phased out, according to western diplomats involved in the negotiations.

Iran says it is enriching uranium solely for a future network of civilian nuclear power stations and to yield isotopes for medical treatments. But if processed much further, refined uranium could be turned into the explosive core of a bomb, which the West fears may be the country’s latent goal.

Western officials were not immediately available to comment on an allegation by the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (coincidentally, also known as Isis), which closely tracks Iran’s nuclear programme. There was no immediate comment from Tehran.

Isis, whose founder David Albright often briefs US lawmakers and others on nuclear proliferation issues, cited a finding in a new report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about Iran.

The confidential document, issued to IAEA member states on Friday, said since the UN agency’s previous report in September Iran had “intermittently” been feeding natural uranium gas into a single so-called IR-5 centrifuge at a research facility.

The IR-5 is one of several new models that Iran has been seeking to develop to replace the erratic, 1970s vintage IR-1 centrifuge that it now uses to produce refined uranium. But unlike other advanced models under development – IR2m, IR-4 and IR-6 – at a research site at its Natanz enrichment plant, Iran had until now not fed the IR-5 with uranium gas.

“Iran may have violated [the interim deal] by starting to feed [natural uranium gas] into one of its advanced centrifuges, namely the IR-5 centrifuge,” Isis said in an analysis of the IAEA report. “Under the interim deal, this centrifuge should not have been fed with [gas] as reported in this safeguards report.”

Another Washington-based group, the Arms Control Association, said it did not believe Iran had violated the deal. “The latest IAEA report says clearly that no enriched uranium is being withdrawn from the machine,” the research and advocacy group said in an email.

Under last year’s deal with the United States, Russia, China, France, Germany and Britain, Iran can continue its “current enrichment R&D [research and development] practices”, language that implies it should not expand them. The text of the publicly released agreement did not elaborate on this point, potentially leaving it open for interpretation.

It was one of the thorniest issues to resolve in the negotiations on the temporary accord – which was designed to buy time for talks on a permanent settlement by a 24 November deadline – and is expected to be a key issue also in any long-term deal.

Experts say Iran has made limited progress so far in developing new centrifuges. “Because enrichment in these centrifuges is intermittent and not continuous, questions arise whether any of the advanced centrifuges work well,” Isis said.

theguardian.com