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U.S. Says Shipping Uranium Out of Iran Is Still Part of Possible Nuclear Deal ‘Tricky Issues’ Remain as Deadline Nears in Nuclear Talks With Iran
(about 14 hours later)
LAUSANNE, Switzerland — American officials said on Monday that they were still negotiating with their Iranian counterparts on one of the main issues remaining in their efforts to reach a deal on Iran’s nuclear program — how to dispose of Iran’s big nuclear stockpile — and that shipping the atomic fuel out of the country was still a possibility. LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Negotiators from the United States, Iran and five other nations pushed into the night on Monday to try to reach a preliminary political agreement on limiting Iran’s nuclear program.
The American officials were pushing back against public statements made on Sunday by Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, that seemed to rule out an accord under which uranium would be sent abroad. But with a Tuesday deadline, it seemed clear that even if an accord were reached some of the toughest issues would remain unresolved until late June.
“The export of stocks of enriched uranium is not in our program, and we do not intend sending them abroad,” he said, according to Agence France-Presse. “There is no question of sending the stocks abroad.” “We are working late into the night and obviously into tomorrow,” Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday night. “There is a little more light there today, but there are still some tricky issues. Everyone knows the meaning of tomorrow.”
Those comments represented an apparent change in position by the Iranian negotiators, who had been reported as having tentatively agreed for months to send a large portion of their uranium stockpile to Russia for reprocessing into a form that would be extremely difficult to use in a nuclear bomb. The main points that the negotiators have been grappling with include the pace of lifting United Nations sanctions, restriction on the research and development of new types of centrifuges, the length of the agreement and even whether it would be detailed in a public document.
The New York Times reported on the statements, which were made by Mr. Araqchi to a number of Iranian and international news organizations. Yet another dispute was highlighted Sunday when Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, told Iranian and other international news organizations that Iran had no intention of disposing of its nuclear stockpile by shipping the fuel out of the country, as the United States has long preferred.
American officials did not criticize Mr. Araqchi’s public comments, which he made to several news organizations, but they insisted that the issue had never been decided in the closed-door talks, even tentatively. That suggests the question may not be resolved until a final accord is struck in June. “The export of stocks of enriched uranium is not in our program, and we do not intend sending them abroad,” Mr. Araqchi said.
“Contrary to the report in The New York Times, the issue of how Iran’s stockpile would be disposed of had not yet been decided in the negotiating room, even tentatively,” a senior State Department official said in a statement that was emailed to reporters. A State Department spokeswoman confirmed that the stockpile question remained unresolved while insisting that Iran had not backtracked in recent days. “The bottom line is that we don’t have agreement with the Iranians on the stockpile issue,” the spokeswoman, Marie Harf, told reporters. “This is still one of the outstanding issues.”
“There is no question that disposition of their stockpile is essential to ensuring the program is exclusively peaceful,” added the official, who declined to be identified under the department’s protocol for briefing reporters. “There are viable options that have been under discussion for months, including shipping out the stockpile, but resolution is still being discussed. The metric is ensuring the amount of material remaining as enriched material will only be what is necessary for a working stock and no more.” The political accord, which American officials hope will be announced on Tuesday, is intended to define the main elements of a comprehensive agreement that it is to be completed by the end of June.
The proposal to ship Iran’s uranium out of the country was seen as giving the talks an important lift when it was reported last year. As the deadline has approached, Mr. Kerry and Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, have been joined by the chief diplomats from France, Britain, Germany, China, Russia and the European Union, though Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, left on Monday.
Under the plan, the fuel would be shipped to Russia and converted there into specialized fuel rods for use at Iran’s commercial reactor at the Bushehr nuclear power plant. Converting the material into fuel rods would make it extremely difficult for Iran to use the uranium to build a nuclear weapon. The United States’ goal is to extend to a year the amount of time, known as the “breakout” time, that Iran would need to produce enough bomb-grade material for a single nuclear weapon. Achieving that objective depends on many factors, including how much nuclear fuel Iran has on hand and how fast it can produce new fuel.
It is unclear how the emerging deal might need to be modified if the accord does not provide for the uranium to be shipped abroad. Some Western officials have said that the issue could be resolved by blending the fuel into a more diluted form and subjecting it to strict monitoring measures. The country has tens of thousands of pounds of uranium in various stages of enrichment, but over the past 18 months it has diluted the portion of its stockpile that was closest to being usable in a weapon.
But such an arrangement might affect other important components of the possible deal, such as the number of centrifuges Iran could retain and operate, the pace at which sanctions could be removed, and the kind of monitoring that would be required. American officials, however, are looking for a longer-term solution. The simplest approach would be to place much of the fuel out of Iran’s reach. Hopes were raised last year when diplomats believed that Iran would be willing to go along with that approach.
Negotiators are trying to agree on the parameters of a deal to limit Iran’s nuclear program by Tuesday. A comprehensive accord, with technical annexes, is to be finished by the end of June. In November, there were reports that Iran had tentatively agreed to send the fuel to Russia for conversion into fuel rods that could power its only commercial power reactor. Ms. Harf insisted on Monday, after Mr Araqchi declared that Iran would never give up the fuel, that there never had been a tentative agreement and that shipping the fuel out of Iran was not a requirement for an agreement.
With the deadline a day away, Secretary of State John Kerry and his other negotiating partners met Monday morning with Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Iranian foreign minister. “You could have some other dispositions for it that get us where we need to be in terms of our bottom line,” she said.
On Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have said they expect a good part of Iran’s nuclear material to be removed from the country, the Iranian declaration triggered more unease.
“The shipping out of Iran’s uranium stockpile was to be the key administration win in this agreement,” Representative Ed Royce, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in an interview Monday. “It was presumed they were going to win on that point because they were giving in on every other point.
“Now,” he added, “it looks like that rationale is being tossed out the window.”
Outside experts said the resolution of the issue was critical to the administration’s ability to make a convincing political case that the United States and its allies would have plenty of warning time if Iran made a dash for a bomb.
Robert Einhorn, a Brookings Institution scholar who worked for the first five years of the Obama administration on the Iran nuclear problem, said that for the last several months the United States and its negotiating partners “have been operating on the assumption that all but several hundred kilograms” of the country’s low-enriched uranium “would be shipped out.”
“Breakout calculations have based on that assumption,” he wrote in an email, using the term for how long it would take Iran to get a weapon’s worth of uranium.
In essence, Mr. Einhorn argued, the assumption that Iran would keep its uranium stockpile at a low level by exporting its fuel has enabled the United States to accept a trade-off in which Iran would be allowed to retain a high number of centrifuges without shortening the breakout time.
“So if Iran is withdrawing its tentative agreement to ship out the stocks, this would be a real setback,” he wrote. “It is not clear what measures would be needed to compensate in order to preserve the one-year breakout time.”
It appears that this issue, both a major political decision and a big technical hurdle, could be put off until June to enable the announcement of a broad but still vague “political understanding.”