Talks End With Proposal to Limit Iran’s Nuclear Production for at Least 10 Years

GENEVA — Iranian and American officials ended a round of high-level nuclear talks here on Monday considering a proposal that would strictly limit for at least 10 years Iran’s ability to produce nuclear material, but gradually ease restrictions on Tehran in the final years of a deal.

A senior American official traveling with Secretary of State John Kerry and Energy Secretary Ernest J. Moniz said the United States would insist that Iran’s nuclear program be constrained for “at least a double-digit number of years” from being able to produce enough material for a bomb should it decide to “break out” of the accord.

The United States has insisted that Iran’s breakout capacity be constrained for as long as possible from producing enough nuclear material to create a bomb in a year.

Iranian officials have said they want an agreement that would allow their country to ramp up the number of centrifuges as soon as possible.
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One way to bridge the difference would be to impose the limits in phases. Strict constraints on the number of centrifuges that Iran could operate might be maintained for the first 10 years of a potential 15-year-agreement and then relaxed in the last five years. Such an approach would allow the Iranians to say the tough constraints would last for only 10 years, and the Americans could say they had a 15-year agreement.

The official, who could not be identified under the Obama administration’s protocol for briefing reporters, was deliberately vague on how long the yearlong limit on breakout time would need to be preserved beyond the first 10 years of an agreement, suggesting that the United States was looking for Iran to make concessions in return for a shortened second phase.

The official said American and Iranian officials made progress during the negotiations here, that, for the first time, included Mr. Moniz and Ali Akbar Salehi, the director of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, who joined Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister.

The negotiations, which began Sunday night in a luxury hotel near Lake Geneva, sought to make progress toward an agreement before a March deadline for finalizing an outline of an accord to limit Tehran’s nuclear program. The two sides plan to meet again next Monday.

“We have made some progress,” a senior administration official told reporters. “We still have a long way to go.”

The March deadline has become an important milestone as the White House is eager to show that progress is being made in order to dissuade Congress from imposing new sanctions on Iran.

It is unclear what form a March agreement might take, if it is reached. Would it be a signed document that the United States, its allies and Iran would make public? Or would it be a confidential record of the status of the talks on which Congress might be briefed but which would not be published?

This latest round of talks is the first time that the countries’ top nuclear officials have participated, a reflection of the complexity of the potential agreement, which seeks to constrain Iran’s nuclear program in return for suspending and eventually removing economic sanctions.

The presence of Mr. Salehi, who received a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Mr. Moniz, who once led the physics department there, could ease progress, though there were no indications that an agreement was imminent.

(President Hassan Rouhani’s brother, Hossein Fereydoon, was also a member of the Iranian delegation here.)

“These meetings are steps in a long and tough process,” the State Department said in a statement.

Asked at the start of Monday’s meeting how the negotiations were proceeding, Mr. Zarif said simply, “It is going.”

“Time is passing,” Mr. Kerry chimed in. “We are working.”

But some Western observers have also raised concerns that Mr. Salehi, who also served as foreign minister in Iran’s previous hard-line government, might seek to protect the country’s nuclear activities from being subjected to stringent limits and restrict Mr. Zarif’s room to maneuver.

In July, for example, Mr. Salehi argued that Iran needed to have industrial-scale ability to enrich uranium by 2021, when a contract under which Russia supplies fuel for Iran’s nuclear reactor at Bushehr is to expire.

When the negotiations were extended in November, United States officials outlined a two-step process for making progress. The first step, they said, would be to work out an agreement outlining the main provisions of an accord by the end of March. The final step would be to complete the entire accord, including its technical requirements, by the end of June.

Both sides have said they are not interested in extending the negotiating deadlines further.

Adding to the pressure to show progress, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, is scheduled to address Congress in early March to present his criticism of the potential accord. On Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu said the emerging deal would be “dangerous for Israel.” He added that it was “astonishing” that the talks were continuing since Iran had yet to to answer longstanding questions that the International Atomic Energy Agency had posed about Tehran’s suspected earlier work on nuclear designs.

After the first phase of a potential deal, Iran might not be restrained in how much nuclear material it could produce, a point that has been at the core of Mr. Netanyahu’s objections.

The United States has outlined a clear goal for what a comprehensive agreement should accomplish: It should slow the Iranian nuclear program enough that it would take the country at least a year to make enough material for a nuclear bomb.

Iran has nearly 10,000 operational centrifuges. To achieve what they consider a safe breakout interval, American negotiators initially proposed establishing a limit of 1,500 basic centrifuges that Iran would be allowed to operate while banning the use of more advanced centrifuges.

Last year, negotiators began exploring a formula under which Iran could have as many as 4,500 first-generation centrifuges if it also agreed to ship much of its low-enriched uranium to Russia or take other steps.

Now, there are reports that the United States might allow Iran to operate 6,500 centrifuges, or perhaps more, if Iran reconfigured its array of centrifuges or took other steps to reduce their efficiency.

Other issues in the talks include limits on the research and development of new types of centrifuges, which could be installed in clandestine plants, and constraints on Iran’s ability to produce plutonium, which can be used to make a nuclear bomb. The negotiators also need to agree on monitoring provisions to guard against cheating and on the duration of any agreement.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-talks.html?_r=0