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With Details of Iran Deal Still in Flux, White House Opens Sales Effort - New York Times


WASHINGTON — President Obama has compared the preliminary accord on limiting Iran’s nuclear program to signing a contract to buy a house, emphasizing that the deal is not done until it closes. But a more accurate analogy might be that the administration bought a house under construction and is still haggling over where the windows and doors should go.


As the White House opens its campaign to sell the merits of the nuclear deal, the unexplained elements of the agreement are about such basics, including precisely the kind of research and development Iran would be able to conduct to make uranium and how fast it could make a nuclear bomb after the 10-year agreement period expired.


Those gaps have already been seized upon by critics, from Israel to Saudi Arabia to the halls of Congress, as they seek to influence the shape of the final agreement, scheduled to be completed by June 30.



“It is imperative to clarify several amorphous issues in the statement of principles and define them better in the final agreement,” wrote Amos Yadlin, who heads a research center at Tel Aviv University. “Without such clarifications, the target set by the U.S. president will not be achieved.”





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Graphic: The Iran Nuclear Deal’s Definition Depends on Who’s Talking


Consider the issue of building highly efficient centrifuges, the machines that enrich uranium. The Obama administration’s account is that Iran would be stuck with its old, unreliable, 1970s-style centrifuges for a decade — and that it would have so little nuclear fuel that there would be no way for the country to produce enough nuclear material to make a bomb in less than a year.


That is a major selling point of the accord, because the current “breakout time” is two to three months. But in the same interview where he compared the deal to buying a house, Mr. Obama told National Public Radio that this breakout time could shrink significantly in the final years of a 15-year accord. This is because the Iranians would be about to conduct research on advanced centrifuges, able to get them up and running after the decade-long restrictions expired. “A more relevant fear would be that in year 13, 14, 15, they have advanced centrifuges that enrich uranium fairly rapidly, and at that point the breakout times would have shrunk almost down to zero,” Mr. Obama said, conceding a point that Israel’s intelligence minister made on Monday.


Mr. Obama argued that even so, the deal was worth it. The American strategy for dealing with the Iranian nuclear program for the past decade or longer has been to buy time, by slowing the effort with sanctions and sabotage. He cast the emerging agreement in the same light.


He conceded that after the expiration of any nuclear deal a successor might have to deal with breakout times that are “much shorter, but at that point we have much better ideas about what it is that their program involves,” Mr. Obama said. “We have much more insight into their capabilities. And the option of a future president to take action if in fact they try to obtain a nuclear weapon is undiminished.”


(After Republican lawmakers pounced on Mr. Obama’s statements as an admission that the agreement would not stop Iran from developing a nuclear bomb as soon as the agreement lapsed, a State Department spokesman said that his remarks had been taken out of context and that the president had been referring to a hypothetical scenario in which there was no deal.)




Play Video|4:58

What’s at Stake in the Iran Negotiations



What’s at Stake in the Iran Negotiations



Can the West trust Iran? Can Iran trust the West? A look at the bet each side is making in the nuclear talks, along with the challenges and risks that they face.


By Emily B. Hager on March 27, 2015.

The likelihood that Iran would be allowed to emerge with a large and technologically advanced uranium enrichment program after the accord expires has been a source of enormous anxiety in Israel and Saudi Arabia. They wanted to keep Iran from becoming a “threshold” nuclear power. Just how much the Iranians would be allowed to operate the more modern centrifuge in the waning years of an agreement remains unclear, and critics are certain to press the White House for tight restrictions.


On other components of the preliminary accord, the administration has been conspicuously vague — perhaps to maintain negotiating flexibility or because the two sides are still at odds.


One example is how Iran’s 10-ton uranium stockpile would be reduced to 700 pounds — the amount the United States says would be the limit. For months, based on statements from Iranian, European and American officials, it had been assumed that Iran would agree to export the uranium to Russia, where it would be converted into fuel for Iran’s lone commercial reactor.


But Mr. Obama acknowledged that the fuel may stay inside the country. Two people with knowledge of the negotiations say that Iran has agreed to “dilute” its low-enriched uranium to its natural state — in other words, after having spent hundreds of millions of dollars or more to enrich uranium, it would spend more money to un-enrich it.


At least publicly, Iran has not ruled out other approaches, including one in which the uranium would be converted into solid reactor fuel. That approach would give Iran the chance to reconvert the fuel back to a form that could be used to enrich the uranium to bomb-grade fuel, Gary Samore, a former adviser to Mr. Obama on weapons of mass destruction, wrote in Foreign Affairs.





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Graphic: A Simple Guide to the Nuclear Negotiations With Iran


So what is the understanding with Iran on the handling of its stockpile? The administration will not say, but critics insist that this provision be clarified.


There are similar questions about the giant underground installation at Fordo — impervious to attack, except by the largest bunker-busting bomb in America’s arsenal. No fissile material would be located at the site. Nor would Iran be allowed to enrich uranium there for 15 years.


But Iran would be allowed to keep 1,000 centrifuges at Fordo, about 300 of which would be used to produce medical isotopes. The others, it seems, would be on “warm standby” — along with another 1,000 at the Natanz enrichment site — where they could be used for enrichment in case the deal fell apart.


Abbas Araqchi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, has been quoted by Iranian journalists as saying that the modifications to the Fordo plant could be reversed quickly if the United States does not hold up its end of the deal.


The issues still left to negotiate have added to the uncertainty about the emerging deal.


On Tuesday, Wendy Sherman, the chief negotiator for the State Department, acknowledged that anyone listening to the descriptions of the agreement in Washington and in Tehran might wonder if they were hearing about the same one.


“We understood that our narratives were likely to be somewhat different but we pledged to try not to contradict each other,” she said on MSNBC.


With three months to go, however, it seems clear that there are still significant gaps in the accord and no shortage of American, Israeli and Arab experts with advice on how to fill them.










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