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Iran has insisted it must be allowed to have its own uranium enrichment capacity for its civil nuclear programme, rejecting a US demand that Tehran must rely exclusively on imported nuclear fuel.
If Washington sticks to the position taken by Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, in the third round of talks in Oman on Saturday, the two sides will have hit their first major negotiating hurdle. They are trying to reach an agreement that blocks off Iran’s access to a nuclear bomb in return for relief from economic sanctions.
The Rubio plan is an attempt at compromise between those inside the US administration who say the only certain way to close off Iran’s path to a nuclear bomb is to dismantle its entire nuclear programme and those that say Iran should be allowed to enrich low purity uranium subject to a full external inspection. That proposal is similar to the system set up in the 2015 nuclear deal from which Donald Trump withdrew the US in his first term.
US national security adviser Mike Waltz had argued Tehran must agree to the “full dismantlement” of its nuclear programme.
But Rubio this week told The Free Press podcast: “If Iran wants a civil nuclear programme, they can have one just like many other countries in the world.” He added that Tehran would be required to “import enriched material”.
Iran’s chief negotiator, Abbas Araghchi, speaking in China, said: “If America’s only demand is that Iran not have nuclear weapons, this is an achievable demand, but if it has impractical and illogical demands, it is natural that we will run into problems.”
In the text of a speech he had been due to deliver virtually to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace this week, Araghchi said: “Iran had a right to be treated with equal respect and this includes our rights as a signatory the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, including the ability to produce fuel for our nuclear power plants. Iran must not be treated as an exception within the global non-proliferation framework.
“We have made abundantly clear that we have nothing to hide which is why Iran under the 2015 nuclear deal agreed to the most intrusive inspection regime the world has ever seen.”
Araghchi spoke of Iran’s long-term plan to build at least 19 more nuclear plants, vowing US firms could bid on the projects meaning “tens of billions of dollars in potential contracts are up for grabs”. This was enough alone, he said, to revive the stagnant nuclear industry in the US.
The former CIA director William Burns, speaking this week at the University of Chicago, said: “I don’t personally think that this Iranian regime is going to agree to zero domestic enrichment. And again, in the comprehensive agreement, that was limited to under 5%, which is what you need for a civilian programme, not for a weapons programme. But that’s going to be one of the big challenges”.
The US has appointed Michael Anton to head a technical team that will work alongside chief negotiator Steve Witkoff. Anton, a speech writer, chef and fashionista, is director of policy planning staff at the Department of State and not an expert on nuclear issues. However, he served on the national security staff in the first Donald Trump administration. He will head a team of 12 officials.
Andrea Stricker, research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said it was “a real risk that Trump could be pushed to negotiate something like an interim deal that would leave Iran’s breakout capability intact with a short timeline to the bomb”.
She added: “We have to remember that Iran only needs a few 100 advanced centrifuges at a secret site to be able to ratchet back up within a couple of months to the level of Iranian stockpiles that it has now, and unless you’re dismantling all of that infrastructure, the equipment, the stockpiles permanently, then you’re not really getting much”.
She predicted Trump might have trouble getting a weak deal through Congress which was “already mobilising on the issue”.
