Vienna, October 22: A top Iranian negotiator praised a plan Wednesday that would ship most of his country’s uranium abroad for enrichment and limit its ability to build a nuclear weapon. There was no guarantee, however, that Tehran’s leaders would accept the idea.
In seven years of back-and-forth diplomatic wrangling, Iran has appeared to accept previous proposals meant to ease fears it might be seeking weapons capability — only to later reject those same proposals. The West says that has given the country time to build its civilian nuclear program and its capacity to generate fissile warhead material.
At the end of three days of talks, International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei said representatives of Iran and its three interlocutors — the U.S., Russia and France — had accepted his draft agreement for forwarding to their capitals.
ElBaradei said he hoped for approval from all four countries by Friday, adding: “I cross my fingers.”
Iran’s refusal to curb its enrichment program has led to three sets of U.N. Security Council sanctions, and it was unclear whether the leaders of the Islamic Republic were ready to deal away their strategic leverage and compromise on their quest for nuclear independence.
Iran insists it has a right to uranium enrichment to create fuel for a nuclear reactor network to generate power, and it dismisses suspicions that it could use the technology to make weapons-grade material for missile payloads.
Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran’s chief delegate, praised the draft, saying it was “on the right track,” while emphasizing that senior Iranian officials in Tehran still had to sign off on it.
“We have to thoroughly study this text and also (need) further elaboration in capitals,” Soltanieh said.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said the draft agreement was “a very positive step.”
“It was acceptable to our team out there, but we want to give it … a chance to be seen by a broader range of people in the interagency here. But I expect we’ll be able to approve it,” he said.
Kelly also praised ElBaradei. “We welcome this effort and we very much support everything that he’s doing,” he said.
Neither Soltanieh nor Elbaradei gave details of what was in the package. But diplomats told The Associated Press that it was essentially the original proposal drawn up by the IAEA that would commit Tehran to shipping 75 percent of its enriched uranium stockpile to Russia for further enrichment within the next two months. The diplomats spoke on condition of anonymity because the meetings were confidential.
Sending such a large amount of enriched uranium outside Iran would temporarily get rid of most of the material it needs to make a bomb.
After that material is turned into metal fuel rods, it would then be shipped back to Iran to power its small research reactor in Tehran, according to the draft.
Beyond postponing Iran’s ability to turn the material into the fissile core of atomic warheads, agreement by Tehran would contribute to building trust between the West and Tehran over the country’s nuclear ambitions and help pave the way for a new round of talks on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program.
After the first meeting between Iran and six world powers in more than a year earlier this month, the U.S. and its Western allies said Iran had agreed in principle to ship out most of its enriched stockpile.
Iranian officials subsequently denied that — and a statement on Iran’s official IRNA news agency just hours after Wednesday’s closing session in Vienna suggested the leadership was far from rubber-stamping the latest proposal.
Reports that the Iranian delegation had expressed support for the draft are “aimed at imposing psychological pressure on Iran,” said the IRNA commentary. “But Iran won’t heed such pressure and will only decide on the basis of its national interests.”
Soltanieh suggested that Iran, which held at least one one-on-one meeting with the U.S. delegation during the three-day talks, had wrested concessions from Washington in exchange for any agreement.
“One of the aspects in addition to the fuel is the control instrumentation and safety equipment of the reactor,” he said. “We have been informed about the readiness of the United States in a technical project with the IAEA to cooperate in this respect.”
Soltanieh did not indicate if the equipment he was describing fell under a U.N. embargo on shipping sensitive nuclear-related material to Iran, which is under Security Council sanctions for refusing to freeze enrichment.
A U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment, said any such help would be indirect because it would be channeled through the IAEA and would come only after Tehran fulfilled its end of the bargain.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged “prompt action” on the part of Iran, warning that the U.S. commitment to engaging the Islamic Republic diplomatically “cannot be open-ended.”
“We are not prepared to talk just for the sake of talking,” she said in a speech to the U.S. Institute for Peace in Washington.
French Foreign Ministry official Jacques Audibert told France 24 TV that acceptance by Iran would “calm down the atmosphere and appease tensions” over Tehran’s nuclear agenda.
A senior diplomat from one of the countries at the Geneva talks told the AP that Tehran’s decision not to send a senior official from Iran to the talks had already dampened hopes that the Iranian delegation would be able to make a binding decision on the proposal.
Iran originally had said that Ali Salehi, an Iranian vice president and head of the national nuclear agency, would lead its delegation. Instead it was Soltanieh, the chief delegate to the IAEA.
An official from one of the six big powers — the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany — said that while the West was hoping that Iran would accept, it was unlikely the Tehran leadership was ready to take the “strategic decision” of giving away most of their enrichment stockpile.
“They lose their leverage in terms of being able to create a nuclear weapon” at least temporarily, he said, also speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment.
While essentially technical, any deal would have significant ramifications.
It would commit Iran to turn over more than 2,600 pounds (1,200 kilograms) of low-enriched uranium. That would significantly ease fears about Iran’s nuclear program, since 2,205 pounds (1,000 kilograms) is the commonly accepted amount of low-enriched uranium needed to produce weapons-grade uranium.
French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner appeared to outline the contours of the deal, insisting his country would not compromise on demanding that Tehran ship out 2,600 pounds of its enriched material, adding: “On that we won’t back down.”
Based on the present Iranian stockpile, the U.S. has estimated that Tehran could produce a nuclear weapon between 2010 and 2015, an assessment that broadly matches those from Israel and other nations.
David Albright of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, which has tracked Iran for signs of covert proliferation, said any deal would buy only a limited amount of time. He said Tehran could replace 2,600 pounds of low-enriched uranium “in little over a year.”
–Agencies