A Doable Iran Deal
By ROGER COHEN, NYT
LONDON — The spin masters are out trying to portray the failure of Iran talks in Geneva this way or that. It was the French who abruptly got tough. No, it was Iran’s insistence that its right to enrich uranium be acknowledged. No, it was just the formidable difficulty of a negotiation between mistrustful adversaries.
In this mess, with its bitter aftertaste, it is worth returning to basics. First, President Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian president, and Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, represent the most serious, credible, moderate and capable negotiators the Islamic Republic is ever likely to produce. There will not be a better opportunity with any other conceivable team within a useful time frame.
Second, according to people who have spent many hours with them, Rouhani and Zarif are prepared to limit enrichment to 3.5 percent (well short of weapons grade); curtail the number of centrifuges and facilities and place them under enhanced international monitoring; deal with Iran’s 20 percent enriched stockpile by converting it under international supervision into fuel pads for the Tehran research reactor; and find a solution on the heavy-water plant it is building at Arak that could produce plutonium. In return, as these steps are progressively taken, they want sanctions relief and recognition of the right to enrichment.
Third, although Western intelligence agencies believe the Islamic Republic has not taken the decision to make a bomb, Iran’s nuclear program has advanced far enough for the country to have the relevant knowledge. Destroying this know-how is near impossible. Iran knows how to produce weapons-grade fissile material; it may not yet be able to make a deliverable weapon. So, as Stephen Heintz, the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, put it to me, “The key for the international community is to put all that capability in a box where it is verifiable, contained and controlled. That is what the deal is about.”
(More here.)
LONDON — The spin masters are out trying to portray the failure of Iran talks in Geneva this way or that. It was the French who abruptly got tough. No, it was Iran’s insistence that its right to enrich uranium be acknowledged. No, it was just the formidable difficulty of a negotiation between mistrustful adversaries.
In this mess, with its bitter aftertaste, it is worth returning to basics. First, President Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian president, and Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, represent the most serious, credible, moderate and capable negotiators the Islamic Republic is ever likely to produce. There will not be a better opportunity with any other conceivable team within a useful time frame.
Second, according to people who have spent many hours with them, Rouhani and Zarif are prepared to limit enrichment to 3.5 percent (well short of weapons grade); curtail the number of centrifuges and facilities and place them under enhanced international monitoring; deal with Iran’s 20 percent enriched stockpile by converting it under international supervision into fuel pads for the Tehran research reactor; and find a solution on the heavy-water plant it is building at Arak that could produce plutonium. In return, as these steps are progressively taken, they want sanctions relief and recognition of the right to enrichment.
Third, although Western intelligence agencies believe the Islamic Republic has not taken the decision to make a bomb, Iran’s nuclear program has advanced far enough for the country to have the relevant knowledge. Destroying this know-how is near impossible. Iran knows how to produce weapons-grade fissile material; it may not yet be able to make a deliverable weapon. So, as Stephen Heintz, the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, put it to me, “The key for the international community is to put all that capability in a box where it is verifiable, contained and controlled. That is what the deal is about.”
(More here.)
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