The New York Times, Geneva, 9 Nov 2013 – Negotiations on an agreement to temporarily freeze Iran’s nuclear program ran into headwinds on Saturday, as France questioned whether the deal would do enough to curb a nuclear reactor that will produce plutonium and to limit Iran’s enrichment of uranium.
Mr. Fabius said that a draft of the agreement was unacceptable to France and that there was no certainty that this round of negotiations would lead to an agreement. “We are hoping for a deal, but for the moment there are still issues that have not been resolved,” he told France Inter radio.
His comments came amid a whirl of diplomatic activity, with Secretary of State John Kerry and foreign ministers from Britain, France, Germany and Russia engaged in round-robin meetings with Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, and the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, who is overseeing the talks.
Hopes that a deal was at hand surged when Mr. Kerry cut short a trip to the Middle East to fly to Geneva on Friday.
But he, too, sought to temper expectations, saying after he arrived that an agreement had not yet been reached and that gaps needed to be narrowed. On Saturday, Mr. Kerry made no comment before his meeting with Mr. Zarif.
While American officials said they sensed an opportunity to sign an interim accord that would freeze Iran’s program for six months and allow both sides to hammer out a more lasting agreement, they also said the United States was ready to meet again in a couple of weeks.
“It’s important that Iran knows we’ll walk away if our concerns aren’t met,” a senior administration official said, “but we do have substantive outlines set well enough that it’s worth trying to narrow gaps.”
France has taken a harder line than the United States in recent years on curbing Iran’s capacity to produce nuclear fuel that could be used in weapon.
Diplomats said the French were particularly concerned about the heavy-water reactor being built near Arak, because it would produce plutonium, an alternative to uranium for fueling a weapon.
At issue is how aggressively to prevent the facility from being completed and started up. Under a compromise favored by the United States, Iran might agree to refrain from operating the facility for the six months of an interim deal, while continuing to work on the installation.
But once the facility is operational, as early as next year, it will be very difficult to disable, since a military strike would ignite the plutonium inside.
French officials also noted a difference between the United States and Europe on the issue of sanctions relief, which Iran is seeking in return for concessions. The most sweeping American sanctions on Iran’s oil and banking industries were passed by Congress, giving President Obama little flexibility to lift them.
That has led the Obama administration to focus on a narrower set of proposals involving Iranian cash that is frozen in overseas banks. Freeing up that cash in installments, in return for specific steps by Tehran, would not require the repeal of any congressional sanctions.
France and other European Union countries, however, face fewer political restrictions on ending their core sanctions, which means any decision to lift them would potentially be more far-reaching.
In addition, officials said that the measures would be more difficult to reinstate should the talks unravel or Iran was to renege on its pledges.
European officials appeared to be balancing their wariness of Iran with a sense that these negotiations were fundamentally different than the fruitless sessions that the six powers held with Tehran, during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“All of the ministers who are here conscious of that fact that some momentum has built up in these negotiations,” Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, told reporters on Saturday. “There is now a real concentration on these negotiations, so we have to do everything we can to seize the moment and seize the opportunity to reach a deal.”
But that momentum has spooked other American allies, notably Israel, which continued Saturday to inveigh against an interim deal.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demanded that Iran shutter the Arak nuclear reactor and give up all enrichment of uranium, not just the 20 percent enrichment that is currently part of the negotiations.
“The more details Israel accumulates regarding the deal taking shape in Geneva,” a senior Israeli official said, “the greater the astonishment at the haste to sign an agreement that is so bad for the world.”
Mr. Netanyahu earlier said the agreement could be a “deal of the century” for Iran. On Friday, Mr. Obama called Mr. Netanyahu to brief him on the talks and to assure him that the United States was still committed to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb.