Iran deal still not yet ready

Another deadline passes in talks on nuclear power

VIENNA — Twelve years of negotiations on how to allow Iran to produce nuclear power while ensuring it can’t produce a nuclear weapon appear to have come down to a handful of details. Whether those details can be worked out remains an unknown.

Negotiators here let another deadline pass Tuesday without an agreement. A senior State Department official suggested to reporters that a new Friday deadline also could slip. “It’s day to day,” said the official, who could not be further identified under the rules of the briefing.

Like a Rubik’s Cube

The official wouldn’t describe what sticking points remained for the negotiators, Iran on one side and six of the world’s most powerful countries — the United States, China, France, Great Britain, Russia and Germany — on the other. The official wouldn’t venture even a number of sticking points, though French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told reporters three issues were delaying the deal. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said there were eight remaining items “to polish.”

The biggest issue at this point from the Iranian perspective, Lavrov said, was the lifting of a U.N. arms embargo on conventional weapons.

Fabius said that for France, the issues remaining are working out “the necessary limitations on nuclear research and development,” the so-called “snap-back” mechanism for re-imposing sanctions if Iran violates the final deal, and resolving questions of the previous military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program.

The senior U.S. official likened the remaining differences, however, to the difficulties of a famous toy puzzle, the Rubik’s Cube.

“Until the last piece clicks in, you don’t know if you can get there,” the official said. “You can get 90 percent of the way there, 95 and 99 percent of the way there, and you can’t get there in the end. So I don’t know.”

‘Substantial progress’

One thing that all sides appeared to agree won’t stop the negotiations is a deadline. Tuesday was a soft deadline of sorts, set a week ago after the last final deadline was missed.

The new deadline is Friday — 10 days after the June 30 deadline that had been set in April when the negotiators settled on a framework for the deal.

A U.S. State Department official said the latest extension is good news.

“We’ve made substantial progress in every area, but this work is highly technical and high stakes for all of the countries involved,” Marie Harf, a State Department spokeswoman, said in a statement.

The senior U.S. official acknowledged the negotiations have dragged on — one member of the U.S. delegation has logged 400,000 air miles during the talks.

But the negotiations would become far more difficult if the negotiators all went home to regroup.

“As difficult as it might be for the Americans to go home and deal with the politics of this situation in America, it is pretty darn hard for the Iranians to go home and deal with the politics in Iran,” the official said.