Following the announcement that the nuclear talks between the P5+1 and Iran have been extended another week until July 7, 2015, US President Barack Obama said in a joint press conference with the visiting Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff at the White House that “As I have said before, there are deep seeded disagreements and divisions between the United States and Iran, and those are not going to go away overnight. The goal of the nuclear negotiations is not to rely on trust, but to set up a verifiable mechanism where we are cutting off the pathways for Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon…”.
President Obama added “My instructions to the US negotiating team in Vienna have been extremely clear. The framework agreement that was established at Lausanne is one that if implemented affectively and codified properly would in fact achieve my goal, which is Iran not obtaining nuclear weapon. There have been lots of talks on the other side from the Iranian negotiators about whether in fact they can abide by some the terms came up in Lausanne. If they cannot, that is going to be a problem. Because I have said from the start, I will walk away from the negotiations, if in fact it’s bad deal. If we can’t provide assurances that the pathways for Iran obtaining nuclear weapon are closed, and if we cannot verify that, if the inspections’ regime, verification regime is inadequate, then we are not going to get a deal. And we have been very clear to the Iranian government about that. And the good news is that our P5+1 partners in these negotiations fell exactly the same way.
“So, there are still some hard negotiations to take place, but ultimately it is going to be up to the Iranians to determine whether of not they meet the requirements that the international community is set for to be able to fairly and accurately and consistently assess whether or not they have foreclosed the possibility of a nuclear weapon. And given past behavior on the part of Iran, that can’t simply be a declaration by Iran and a few inspectors wondering around every once awhile. That’s going to have to be a serious, rigorous verification mechanism and that I think is going to be the test to whether we are going to have a deal or not.”