Iran nuclear talks resume in search of final deal
As a July 20 deadline looms for a nuclear agreement between Iran and world powers, finding a way around an impasse over the size of Iran's program for producing nuclear fuel will be key to whether an accord can be struck.
Negotiators will meet again Wednesday to seek an agreement that would remove crippling U.S. and international sanctions designed to force Iran to stop enriching uranium for suspected weapons.
When negotiators last met, on June 20, a large gap remained over the enrichment issue.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposes any accord that lets Iran continue to enrich nuclear fuel. "What Iran is seeking is to keep the materials and the means to make nuclear weapons, and just allow inspections," Netanyahu said Sunday. "Keep and inspect, rather than dismantle and remove — that's the bad deal."
Iran says it needs to produce fuel for a nuclear power plant built by Russia and other plants it plans to build. The process worries the six world powers — United States, Britain, France, Russia, China and Germany — because it can be used to produce fuel for bombs. Despite Iran's claims that its program is peaceful, the United States, Israel and other nations suspect Iran of hiding a secret weapons program.
Any enrichment program capable of fueling a power plant would be so big that Iran would be able to make enough nuclear material for a bomb faster than anyone could stop it, and possibly without being detected at all, says David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, who has testified before Congress on the Iranian nuclear program. "It's a non-starter," Albright says.
Iran has spent so many billions of dollars on the program, it is loath to give up on it now. Still, safeguards and monitoring can be put in place that would ensure Iran doesn't cheat, says Kelsey Davenport, an analyst at Arms Control Association, an advocacy group.
Iran currently has about 19,000 centrifuges installed, about half of them operating. Before November's interim agreement that slowed its program, the U.S. estimated that Iran could produce enough highly enriched uranium for a bomb in a month or two. That so-called breakout time has been doubled under the temporary agreement.
To achieve a six-to-12 month goal described by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Iran's enrichment program would have to shrink to about 5,000 of its most primitive centrifuges. A centrifuge program that would produce enough fuel to power the Russian-built nuclear reactor at Bushehr would need 100,000 of those centrifuge machines.
Most of Iran's centrifuges are primitive, but the country has developed some that are three to five times more efficient, and is working on models that would be 15 times more efficient. The temporary agreement allows Iran to produce enough uranium fuel for "practical needs."
George Perkovich, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who recently returned from a five-day trip to Tehran and met with people knowledgeable about the negotiations, proposes that Iran reduce its capacity to enrich uranium for the time being. However, he says world powers should allow it to increase its enrichment program as it builds more nuclear plants.
"At present, based on established international practices, there is not a plausible justification for the current scale of enrichment they're doing," Perkovich says.
Another recent proposal, developed by a group of experts at Princeton University including Hossein Mousavian, a former spokesman for the Iranian negotiating team, would allow Iran to update its centrifuges with more efficient ones, and allow it to continue to enrich uranium at current levels until it needs more to fuel its reactors. That proposal would rely on strict international monitoring to ensure the world that Iran sticks to its pledge to keep the program peaceful.
If Iran rejects Perkovich's proposal, it would buttress arguments by critics such as Israel that its aim is "to have a rationale to have a large enrichment program that the rest of the world could correctly infer is for military purposes," Perkovich says.
U.S. negotiators have made similar proposals and been turned down by the Iranians, says Jofi Joseph, a former director for non-proliferation at President Obama's National Security Council.
World powers have been "very unified in their position," Joseph says. "Ultimately, Iran has to make a decision that it will accept a symbolic enrichment program if it's to get real sanctions relief and end its international isolation."