Iran Negotiators Face Late Obstacles to a Deal

WASHINGTON — The United States and Iran are closing in on a historic agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program, but are confronting serious last-minute obstacles, including when United Nations sanctions would be lifted and how inspections would be conducted, American and European officials said.

Secretary of State John Kerry, who heads to Lausanne, Switzerland, on Sunday night for a critical round of talks, is still clashing with his Iranian counterpart over Tehran’s demand that all United Nations sanctions be suspended as soon as there is a deal, as well as Washington’s insistence that international inspectors be able to promptly visit any nuclear site, even those on Iranian military bases.

There are also disagreements over Iran’s research and development of advanced centrifuges, which would allow Iran to produce nuclear fuel far more quickly, as well as over how many years an agreement would last.

The White House hopes that an accord might eventually open a new chapter in a relationship that has been marked largely by decades of mutual suspicion, Iranian-sponsored terrorism, American cyberattacks and Iranian retaliation. But even the prospect of the deal has set off a furious political confrontation between the White House and Republicans who say an accord will fail to end Iran’s bomb program and even encourage Arab nations to mount their own nuclear efforts. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told Congress recently that the effect of the emerging deal with Iran would be “to move from preventing proliferation to managing it.”

The areas of convergence in the deal circulating in Washington and European capitals include a complex arrangement in which Iran would ship large portions of its stockpiles of uranium out of the country, almost certainly to Russia. In return, the United States and its negotiating partners could allow Iran to keep roughly 6,500 of its centrifuges spinning, rather than the few hundred that were under discussion a year ago.

The number of centrifuges, which may be altered in the final stages of talks, will take on outsize proportions in the public debate here. Opponents of the deal argue that it will leave the Iranians with a latent production capacity, even though the country would have limited amounts of uranium to work with. American officials insist that for at least the first 10 years of a final accord, the mix of fuel and enrichment capacity will leave the United States, Israel and others with at least a year’s worth of warning time if Iran raced to make a bomb’s worth of material — compared to just a few months of warning time today.

But inside the negotiating rooms, there are still major debates about how to phase in the lifting of United Nations, American and European sanctions as Iran complies with the terms. The sanctions standoff underscores a little-discussed but politically volatile issue for the Obama administration: how quickly Iran would see economic and technological benefits from any accord.

A suspension, and ultimate elimination, of the sanctions on oil exports and financial transactions is the key issue for President Hassan Rouhani of Iran and his lead negotiator, Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, if they hope to sell a 10-year or longer limitation on their nuclear activity to Iranian mullahs and military leaders who have opposed the negotiations. As details of the talks leak, they are being used by opponents in Tehran, especially the Revolutionary Guard Corps, which oversees the military side of the nuclear program. They argue that by limiting Iran’s capabilities for so many years, the United States would use an accord to thwart Iran’s emergence as the major power in the Middle East.

But any rapid lifting of sanctions — by vote of the Security Council and by President Obama’s decisions to gradually waive imposition of American- imposed economic penalties — could intensify the already fierce congressional debate. Congress would ultimately need to vote to remove American sanctions, though it might not be asked to do so until Mr. Obama is out of office. And some Republicans may balk at doing that and instead try to toughen the terms, perhaps to the point that Iran might no longer accept them.

An adviser to Mr. Kerry said the secretary recently expressed concern that even if he wins his last negotiating points with Iran, any accord “is going to be a heavy lift” in Congress.

“He’s rightly worried,” said the adviser, who would not be named because he was discussing sensitive diplomatic talks. “The chances of reaching an agreement are now higher than ever, and the chances it will collapse politically here are higher, too.”

Mr. Kerry is calling in reinforcements to bolster the argument that an accord would guarantee that, for a decade or more, that the United States and its allies have at least a year’s warning before Iran could manufacture a bomb’s worth of weapons-grade nuclear fuel. Energy Secretary Ernest J. Moniz, a nuclear scientist who has negotiated with his Iranian counterpart during the last two rounds of talks, is part of the American team at the coming negotiations as well. Mr. Moniz is there to negotiate details that once seemed as if they were the eye-glazing stuff of diplomacy — how to modify arrays of centrifuges so they cannot easily make weapons fuel, for example — which is suddenly becoming crucial to the political debate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/15/world/middleeast/iran-negotiators-face-late-obstacles-to-a-deal.html?_r=0