Iranian official stands firm on nuclear deal

NEW YORK — Iran’s foreign minister on Thursday rejected any new negotiation with the United States over extending the length or conditions of the 2015 nuclear accord, saying that Iran would talk about changing the accord only if every concession it made — including giving up nuclear fuel — were reconsidered.

In an interview, the foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said that would mean Iran would retake possession of the stockpile of nuclear fuel it shipped to Russia when the accord took effect.

“Are you prepared to return to us 10 tons of enriched uranium?” Zarif said of the relinquished stockpile — one of Iran’s biggest concessions — about 98 percent of the country’s nuclear fuel holdings.

Under the agreement, Iran retains an amount of enriched uranium too small to make a single atomic weapon.

Zarif spoke a day after he conferred privately with counterparts from the six countries that negotiated the deal with Iran — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States — on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly meetings in New York.

It was the first time Zarif had met with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has said the United States wants to “revisit” what he described as flaws in the accord, even as he acknowledged Iran is abiding by its terms.

Zarif described President Donald Trump’s speech to the U.N. on Tuesday, in which Trump called the accord a one-sided embarrassment to the U.S., as “absurd.”

What the administration really wants, Zarif said, is to keep the Iranian concessions while trying to extract more from Iran.

He also dismissed the idea of an addendum to the pact to address the Trump administration’s objections, an idea that U.S. officials say has been floated within the administration.

Top diplomats from Germany, Russia, China and Italy insisted Thursday there can be no turning back on the deal.