IN THE White House, as the Iran nuclear deal was on, then off, then on again, a Harvardeducated lawyer pored over the technical niceties of heavy water reactors and uraniumenriching centrifuges with forensic attention, convinced the devil lay in the details.
It was a tough brief to master. The proposals transmitted for perusal – often orally, deliberately not committed to paper – were being prepared by two nuclear physicists who had spent their formative years together at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the renowned centre of scientific learning just down the road from Harvard.
There was, however, one advantage to this method of work, which put academic analysis before geopolitical manoeuvring.
The men parsing the scientific details did not then have to summarise them in layman’s language for the politicians who were negotiating the deal: they were themselves the politicians negotiating the deal. As the nuclear talks dragged on in Lausanne last week, 36 hours after the deadline set by President Barack Obama, detail had become all important. This was an agreement being thrashed out proton by proton, by teams of scientists and diplomats behind closed doors for eight days straight.
Journalists who had been kept “out of the room” resorted in desperation to descriptions of the lakeside town where they were taking place.
Some even observed that the setting contributed to the result: the pristine streets and beautiful hotels were firsthand evidence, they said, of the virtues of neutral Switzerland’s centuries of peace, of jaw-jaw rather than war-war.
In fact, the deal was a product of Cambridge, Massachusetts, home to both Harvard and MIT.
In order to take personal control, Mr Obama – a Harvard law graduate – trained himself in nuclear science, according to his aides.
One official claimed that by the end, in meetings in the White House situation room, he understood the technical issues as well as “almost anybody in the room” except for his energy secretary, Ernest Moniz.
He studied the way the centrifuges installed in Natanz, the Iranians’ giant uranium processing facility, operated. He read, according to one account in the New York Times, briefings on three alternative ways of converting Iran’s nuclear plant at Arak so that it could not be used to create weapons-grade material. He personally examined and approved proposals for the heavily intrusive inspections programme to be carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Significantly, Mr Obama had already taken a key step: two years previously, in May 2013, when negotiations over the whole issue of Iran’s nuclear programme seemed becalmed, he appointed Mr Moniz, one of the country’s leading nuclear physicists, as a “technocratic” energy secretary.
As the talks headed into their final round, Mr Moniz was drafted into the negotiating team. Arriving in Lausanne, he sat for hour after hour face-to-face with the head of the Iranian Atomic Energy Organisation, Ali Akbar Salehi.
The men claim not to have known each other in the years they spent together at MIT in the Seventies, when Mr Moniz was there as a young assistant professor and Mr Salehi was doing his PhD, and sadly no photographs have emerged of the two together at fraternity house parties or baseball games to prove otherwise.
But negotiators agree that the two men’s ability to find scientific compromises that met or sidestepped the political demands of Washington and Tehran was vital to Thursday’s agreement.
The biggest breakthrough came over the once-secret enrichment plant at Fordow, near the city of Qom, revealed to a shocked world during a previous, failed attempt at negotiating a deal in 2009.
Drilled into a mountain, the Iranians built it deep enough to survive any attack Israel could throw at it, and all but the most powerful American “bunker-buster” bombs. Closing it down was a clear demand of the West – but that would be a humiliating retreat too great for the Iranians to allow.
Whether or not the Iranians intended to build a bomb, their national prestige was now vested in such stunning symbols of their programme.
But the negotiators managed to work out an alternative use for 1,000 of Fordow’s centrifuges, allowing them to keep spinning there under the IAEA’s inspection regime. Iran could say it had kept its operation going, the Americans that the programme was no longer capable of producing fissile material.
It was a big shift for both
sides. As late as 2013, the Americans were saying the talks had to leave no working centrifuges in Iran. On the Iranian side, its key secret plant is now essentially a simulacrum.
Likewise, on Arak, the deal sees the plant neither decommissioned nor allowed to produce weapons-suitable plutonium waste. Instead, it will be redesigned according to one of Mr Obama’s preferred alternatives, and its waste will be exported.
None of which is to say the deal was not inherently political. It had been preceded by months of intense, confidence-building talks between Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister, and John Kerry, the US secretary of state.
Mr Kerry spent more time with his Iranian counterpart than with any other world leader in 2014 – extraordinary given that the two countries do not even have diplomatic relations.
However, by the final days of the negotiations, Mr Kerry was sometimes reduced to taking bicycle rides around Lausanne.
The efforts made to keep politics out of the game often appeared farcical. Wendy Sherman, the former social worker now under-secretary who headed the American negotiating team, was followed everywhere she went by a white board on which her aides noted down the technical agreements as they were made.
By avoiding committing them to paper, they were able to stop them being sent to Tehran where they might be vetoed.
As a result, there was also nothing to leak to journalists – meaning they were kept in the dark until the last moment as to who was “winning” the debate.
Instead, once these technical solutions were proposed, the American side went straight by video conference to the White House, where Mr Obama was waiting.
The key moment came as the deadline he had set – as a sop to the American Right, parts of which are viscerally opposed to a deal – came and went on Tuesday night, as March slipped into April.
There was a fear that Mr Salehi’s technical mastery was actually becoming a blind. In one session, he engaged Mr Moniz in a complex debate
that went so far above the heads of other participants they thought they were being “played”.
At this point, the Iranians seemed convinced Mr Obama was so committed to doing a deal that when the deadline came he would agree to whatever was put before him.
As the American side came out of a day of talks that had lasted from 5am to 1.30am, they then had to confess to Mr Obama that nothing was, yet, doing.
Based on his view of the details, Mr Obama had the confidence to play hardball. He said to tell the Iranians he was prepared to scrap the deal. In fact, he was ready and willing not only to scrap the deal but even to go to Congress to demand more sanctions if his “red lines” were not met.
That, according to the Western side at least, is what broke the logjam.
The end result is a deal which on the surface gives both sides exactly what they want – for the next 15 years, at least. The Iranians are allowed to keep all their nuclear facilities intact.
They will take down 13,000 of their 19,000 centrifuges – but keep them in storage.
They can return to enriching uranium to weapons grade – but only by openly scrapping the deal, such is the level of inspection. It would take a year, such is the level of IAEA scrutiny agreed.
The principal remaining issue is the speed at which sanctions are lifted – something beyond a technical fudge, since it is the one thing whose effects will be seen on the ground, as cash and investment pour back on to the streets.
On Tuesday, the Iranians were saying all sanctions had to be lifted immediately. Now they concede that American sanctions at least will only go when the IAEA verifies that the nuclear commitments are met.
What that raises is, of course, the big issue – the issue that critics say Mr Obama’s technocratic approach has missed altogether.
It was never likely that Iran was going to build a bomb to drop on Israel – something likely to kill as many Palestinians as Israelis.
The fear, of both Israel and America’s Sunni allies in the Gulf, was that the bomb would make Iran’s rise to power in the Muslim Middle East unstoppable.
By unleashing the power of the Iranian economy – by putting its oil and banks back in play – that end could be achieved just as easily.
More money in Iranians’ pockets means more money in the pockets of Hizbollah, Hamas and the Syrian government of President Bashar alAssad.
But Mr Obama has always been more focused in his political aims than such broader pictures – in doing what he can do now, and ignoring unforeseeable consequences.
Some hope that a realignment of Iranian policy will now follow – that it can no longer regard as a “Great Satan” a country with whose leaders it has dealt so closely.
But that does not seem to be either Mr Obama’s hope or expectation.
“This deal is not based on trust,” he said in his weekly radio broadcast yesterday. “It’s based on unprecedented verification.”
Trust cannot be measured by scientists, and in Iran’s case, appears to be part of no one’s calculations.