French objections scuttle partial Iranian nuke deal
GENEVA — After several days of optimistic reports that negotiations with Iran were on track to produce the first agreement in a decade to freeze its nuclear program, the talks ended early today without an agreement, the French foreign minister said.
The talks hit a snag Saturday with a French objection that the proposed deal did not do enough to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Even as U.S. diplomats made a final push for an agreement late Saturday, the marathon talks laid bare the challenge of drafting a deal that would satisfy both the Iranians and a group of major powers with their own interests and agendas.
Six world powers and Iran agreed to resume talks Nov. 20.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry huddled for hours with Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammed Javad Zarif, as the United States struggled to narrow differences on issues like curbing Iran’s uranium enrichment program and a nuclear reactor, under construction, that will produce plutonium.
Kerry spoke early today to reporters after the more
than three days of efforts between Iran and the six world powers to limit Iranian nuclear activities in exchange for some sanctions relief on Tehran.
Despite the lack of agreement, Kerry said the negotiators “not only narrowed the differences … but we made significant progress.”
Kerry touched on reports of differences with France, saying the U.S. shared some French concerns. He said, “We are grateful to the French for the work we did together.”
Top European Union diplomat Catherine Ashton joined Zarif to announce progress but no conclusive results.
Ashton spoke of “a lot of concrete progress” but also of “some differences.” Zarif said he hoped those disagreements will be resolved at a future meeting.
Signs of division first emerged when French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said a draft of a potential deal was unacceptable to France, and he added that there was no certainty that this round of negotiations would lead to an agreement. “We are hoping for a deal, but for the moment there are still issues that have not been resolved,” he told France Inter, a public radio station.
His comments came amid a whirl of diplomatic activity, with Kerry and foreign ministers from Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China engaged in round-robin meetings with Zarif and the EU’s foreign-policy chief, Ashton, who is overseeing the talks. Kerry also met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
Zarif insisted that there had been progress, although he conceded that the diplomats might leave this round empty-handed. “That won’t be a disaster,” he said in an interview with the BBC, “because we have started an important process and, provided that we can continue this process and try to reach positive results, I think we’ve done extremely important work.”
Hopes that a deal was at hand surged Friday when Kerry cut short a trip to the Middle East to fly to Geneva. But he, too, sought to temper expectations, saying after he arrived that an agreement had not yet been reached and that differences remained. On Saturday, Kerry made no further comment before a two-hour meeting with Zarif.
While talks continued Saturday afternoon, it increasingly appeared that the negotiators would be unable to resolve all of the issues, and officials said they hoped to return in coming weeks to try again.
U.S. officials said they had sensed an opportunity to wrap up an interim accord that would freeze Iran’s program for perhaps six months and give both sides a window of time in which to reach a more lasting agreement. But they also said the United States was ready to meet again in a couple of weeks should the remaining differences prove hard to overcome.
“It’s important that Iran knows we’ll walk away if our concerns aren’t met,” a senior administration official said, “but we do have substantive outlines set well enough that it’s worth trying to narrow gaps.”
France has taken a harder line than the United States in recent years on curbing Iran’s capacity to produce nuclear fuel that could be used in weapons. Diplomats said the French were particularly concerned about the heavy-water reactor being built near Arak, because it would produce plutonium, an alternative to uranium for fueling a weapon.
Iran insists it is pursuing only nuclear energy, medical treatments and research, but the U.S. and its allies fear that Iran could turn enriched uranium into the fissile core of nuclear warheads. Iran currently runs more than 10,000 centrifuges that have created tons of fuel-grade material that can be further refined to arm nuclear warheads.
It also has nearly 440 pounds of higher-enriched uranium in a form that can be turned into weapons much more quickly. Experts say 550 pounds of 20 percent-enriched uranium are needed to produce a single warhead.
Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said the Arak plant could be dealt with in a future phase of the talks, because it would take a year for it to be completed and much more time for it to produce plutonium that could be extracted for a bomb.
But Kerry said during his visit to Israel last week that the United States was asking Iran, as part of an interim accord, to agree to a “complete freeze over where they are today,” implying that Iran’s plutonium-production program would be affected in some way as well. Under a compromise favored by some U.S. officials, Iran might agree to refrain from operating the facility for six months while continuing to work on the installation.
Once the reactor at Arak is operational, as early as next year, it might be very hard to disable it through a military strike without risking the dispersal of nuclear material. That risk might eliminate one of the West’s options for responding to Iran and reduce its leverage in the talks.
The heavy-water reactor at Arak has been a contentious negotiating point because it would give Iran another pathway to a bomb. Moreover, the Iranian explanations for why it is building in Arak have left most Western nations and nuclear experts skeptical. The energy-rich country has no need for the fuel for civilian uses, and the reactor’s design renders it highly efficient for producing the makings of a nuclear weapon.
Israel has been vocal about not letting the new reactor get to the point where the fuel is inserted, after which military action against the reactor could create an environmental disaster. Israel has destroyed two reactors from the air in the past three decades, in Iraq in 1981 and in Syria in 2007. Both attacks took place before fuel had been put in the reactors.
French officials also noted a difference between the United States and Europe on the issue of sanctions relief, which Iran is seeking in return for a halt in nuclear activities. The most sweeping U.S. sanctions on Iran’s oil and banking industries were passed by Congress, giving President Barack Obama little flexibility to lift them.
Still, European officials appeared to be balancing their wariness of Iran with a hopeful sense that these negotiations were fundamentally different from the fruitless sessions during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
But that momentum has spooked other U.S. allies, notably Israel, which continued Saturday to inveigh against an interim deal.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demanded that Iran shutter the Arak nuclear reactor and give up all enrichment of uranium, not just the 20 percent enrichment that is at issue in the negotiations.
Netanyahu rejected the potential accord Friday as a “very bad deal.” Foreign companies are lining up to get back into Iran once some sanctions are lifted, Israeli Finance Minister Yair Lapid told BBC Radio 4 on Saturday.
Netanyahu earlier said the agreement could be a “deal of the century” for Iran. On Friday, Obama called Netanyahu to brief him on the talks and to assure him that the United States was still committed to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb.