Iran Nuclear Talks: The Real Goal is to Keep Talking

A safe bet is that some sort of partial agreement or outline of principles is going to emerge from Geneva before the Monday deadline for the P5+1 talks with Iran on its nuclear program. 

A working framework will allow talks to continue. I believe this the raison d'etre of the P5+1 process. It is not to arrive at a final agreement because once that happens the U.S. Congress, serving at the behest of neocons and the state of Israel, will plunge in its tusked snout and tear apart any accord; and the same can be said for Iran. As Thomas Erdbrink notes  in "A Nuclear Deal Is Likely to Hit Hurdles in Iran":

In Iran, the final decision on a nuclear deal lies with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader. And if history is an accurate guide, the real debate over an accord, should one be reached, will not begin to unfold until after it is announced. When that debate gets underway, the voices of the hard-liners — the clerics, Revolutionary Guards commanders, conservative lawmakers and others who are by and large closest to the supreme leader — will be raised against any compromise on Iran’s right to enrich uranium.

There is no terra firma here. That becomes clear after reading Michael Gordon's excellent recapitulation, "U.S. Lays Out Limits It Seeks in Iran Nuclear Talks," of the salient details of the ongoing negotiations in Geneva. What one comes away with is a strong sense that the deal being hammered out is an elaborate ruse, a classic Hitchcockian MacGuffin, whose purpose is to keep the narrative moving and nations bargaining.

There are too many variables and arbitrary imperatives and artificial benchmarks. The key measurement appears to be an one-year minimum for nuclear "breakout" for Iran. The U.S. assumes, I guess, that Iran has already secretly solved all the difficult technical issues of fashioning a trigger for a nuclear device. So the U.S. bargaining position is predicated on limiting that which it thinks it can measure -- the amount of fissile uranium in Iran's possession and Iran's ability to produce that uranium.

Negotiations therefore revolve around how to reduce Iran's stockpile of fissile uranium and its centrifuges. As Gordon compactly explains:

The United States long ago dropped the goal of eliminating Iran’s enrichment ability, a demand that Israel has long insisted was the surest way to guarantee Iran did not maintain an option to pursue the development of nuclear arms.

So the negotiations have been focused on measures that would constrain Iran’s ability to quickly produce a nuclear bomb but allow it the ability to maintain what Iran insists is a peaceful program of nuclear power and research. Shortly after arriving here Thursday night to join the talks, Mr. Kerry met for more than two hours with Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, and Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s envoy to the Iran talks. But there was no word on whether they had made any headway. 

One critical question is how many and what type of centrifuges Iran will be allowed to keep to continue enriching uranium. Another question is what happens to the nuclear material Iran already possesses, which could be used in making a bomb. A third question is what kind of measures can be taken to limit Iran’s ability to produce plutonium, which can also be used in producing a nuclear weapon. Affecting all of these issues is the length of time an accord would be in effect. 

At the same time, the Western and Iranian negotiators must agree on a schedule for suspending or lifting sanctions, Iran’s goal in the talks, while preserving the West’s leverage in case the accord begins to fray. 

Iran has nearly 10,000 operational centrifuges, which Iran insists will be used to make fuel for civilian reactors. But given Iran’s current abilities, Mr. Kerry has said that it would not take Iran long to produce enough enriched material for a bomb if it abandoned the temporary freeze it had been observing while talks are underway.

“I think it’s public knowledge today that we’re operating with a time period for a so-called ‘breakout’ of about two months,” Mr. Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April. 

It would take far longer for Iran to take a bomb’s worth of fissile material, which can sustain a chain reaction, and fashion it into a weapon that could be delivered by a plane or missile. But since such work might be hard to detect and would be beyond the scope of an agreement, the breakout time to produce fissile material for a weapon has become an important indicator of Iran’s intentions.

“Enrichment time needs to be pushed to a year,” said Gary Samore, a former senior National Security Council official and president of an advocacy group called United Against Nuclear Iran. “This is what they need to have in order to sell the deal to Congress and U.S. allies.” 

To achieve an adequate breakout time, American and other international negotiators initially proposed establishing a 1,500 limit on the number of basic centrifuges Iran would be allowed to operate while banning the use of more advanced centrifuges.

Iran, however, has steadfastly refused to agree to a major reduction in centrifuges, although recently some Iranians have hinted that the number could be set at 8,000. 

More recently, negotiators have been exploring a formula in which Iran could have as many as 4,500 first-generation centrifuges if it also agreed to ship much of its low-enriched uranium to Russia or take other offsetting steps. For a considerable fee, Russia would convert the fuel into rods that would be burned in Iran’s lone operating commercial power reactor. 

Some combination of moving Iranian stockpiles of fissile uranium to Russia for reprocessing and reducing the number of Iranian centrifuges, but not so steeply as the U.S. wants, is seen as a credible foundation for a working agreement.

But knottier problems lie with the kind of inspection regimen Iran will countenance and the timeline of any agreement:

A major stumbling block is the question of how long an agreement should last. Iran has argued that it could be seven years or even less. That, Iranian officials say, would enable Iran to install tens of thousands of new centrifuges to enrich its own uranium after a Russian contract to supply nuclear fuel for the reactor at Bushehr, Iran, expires in 2021. 

But an agreement that would shrink Iran’s network of centrifuges only to see it expand exponentially within a decade is a nonstarter for the United States. 

“I would say about 15 years,” said Robert J. Einhorn, a former senior State Department official. “There has to be a sustained track record of scrupulous Iranian implementation of a deal before the international community will have confidence that the program is strictly peaceful.”

Kerry stopped off in Paris on his way to Geneva; he compared notes with his French counterpart Laurent Fabius, who has played the role of bad cop in the P5+1 talks, as well as Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud al-Faisal.

The larger reality is that if talks were to end without any agreement, the Saudis and Israelis would feel compelled to mount an assault on Iran, which, given the war with Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, would likely prove to be catastrophically destabilizing. Kerry is lining up his ducks to make sure the P5+1 process doesn't crater. He can sell the fact that maintaining the Geneva talks keeps Iranian centrifuges from spinning,

The Saudis and Israelis can live with this knowing in two years it will either be a warhawk neocon Hillary in the White House or some even more bellicose Republican. Iran can be smashed then.