MAY 15, 2014
WASHINGTON — Unreasonable optimism surrounds talks between Iran and major powers that resumed this week with the aim of moving beyond an interim deal to a long-term accord that ensures a limited Iranian nuclear program that can only be put to civilian use.
An agreement would be the best outcome by far. The other options are a continuation of the relentless build-up of Iranian nuclear capacity seen over the past decade or war. As Jessica Mathews put it in The New York Review of Books, “The price of an agreement will be accepting a thoroughly monitored, appropriately sized enrichment program in Iran that does not rise over 5 percent. The alternatives are war or a nuclear-armed Iran.”
That choice may sound like a no-brainer. The perfect must not be the enemy of the good. But the distance between the parties is huge.
Some of the problems are political. Israel is holding out for complete dismantlement, a nonstarter that has many backers in Congress. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has given his negotiators latitude to explore a deal but remains ambivalent (at best) about the concessions needed and convinced that regime change is America’s intent. Powerful political factions in both the United States and Iran would be delighted to see everything unravel even if they have nothing constructive to put in its place.
The biggest obstacles are concrete and technical. They involve the basic issues of what size nuclear program is plausibly consistent with civilian use only; how to ensure the barrier between such a program and militarization is rock-solid; how to achieve complete transparency and relentless verification beyond anything seen in other non-nuclear-armed states that enrich uranium; and what to do about a question scarcely addressed in the interim accord: Iran’s missile development and its purpose.
What this means in practice is that the United States and its partners cannot accept an Iranian enrichment facility buried in a mountain, which is what Fordow is. But convincing Khamenei to close Fordow while force remains a threat will be problematic.
Iran now has some 19,000 centrifuges, of which 10,000 are spinning. It wants to increase that number on the far-fetched grounds that it cannot rely on Russia to supply fuel for its one nuclear power plant. To the contrary, the major powers will insist that the quantity of centrifuges be cut to a fraction of the current number, probably no more than 4,000.
The same sharp division exists over Iran’s stockpiles. It has over 7,600 kilograms of low-enriched uranium (supposedly for reactor fuel but usable for further enrichment). It wants to increase the stockpile. The United States and its partners want to slash it, either by immediate conversion into fuel rods or removal to another location.
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On inspection and verification, currently more intensive than ever before under the terms of the interim deal, there will also be difficulties as the Obama administration presses for access that goes beyond even the Additional Protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran (unlike Israel) is an NPT signatory. But it has not implemented the protocol. The need to establish an unbreakable red line between civilian and military use of nuclear technology — a recurrent problem inherent in the wording of the NPT — is of paramount importance in Iran given its past deception and the grotesque disparity between the size of its nuclear program and its declared peaceful aim.
As for Iran’s missile program, the difficulties also look immense, complicated by the near-certainty that the six-power partnership negotiating with Iran will fray, with Russia arguing that any attempt to limit the type and range of Iranian missiles lies beyond the scope of the nuclear talks. That is not the view of Western powers and certainly not of Israel, whose concerns in this area are acute.
None of this is to suggest an agreement is impossible, even if the late-July deadline looks ambitious, and the further six months envisaged in the interim accord may well be needed. It is to sound a cautionary note. Raising hopes is unhelpful. The sobriety and seriousness that allowed America and Iran to get this far after more than three decades of traumatized estrangement should be the model. What has already been done in diplomatic bridge-building constitutes a remarkable achievement.
Every diplomatic effort on both sides must now be exhausted to reach beyond immense differences and close a deal. War would achieve little or nothing — it certainly would not enhance Israel’s security — and it would entrench Iran’s hard-liners for a generation. A third war in the Middle East is the last thing America wants or needs.
Ushering Iran toward the community of nations, which is what an agreement would begin to do, is the best hope for the country’s highly educated, contact-seeking, generally pro-American population. Khamenei fears this. It may prove the decisive factor if he opts for “nyet.” But his people deserve no less.
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