Iran Nuclear Talks Still Short Of ‘Significant Compromises’
Talks over Iran’s atomic program in Vienna seem likely to continue beyond Friday as United States and Iranian negotiators tackle European proposals to bridge gaps.
Talks over Iran’s atomic program in Vienna seem likely to continue beyond Friday as United States and Iranian negotiators tackle European proposals to bridge gaps.
Iran’s chief negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani met Friday with Enrique Mora, the European Union official acting as a go-between with a US team led by special envoy Rob Malley, and with Wang Kun, China’s ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Iran has refused to meet the American face-to-face.
EU officials have argued that a text circulated by EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell in late July should be a basis for the US and Iran to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), which the US left in 2018 prompting Iran after 2019 to expand its nuclear program beyond JCPOA limits.
But the Europeans have also highlighted remaining challenges, including intricate links between ‘technical’ and political issues, the question of which US sanctions introduced after 2018 contravene the deal, and Tehran’s demand for guarantees over access to world markets if the JCPOA is revived.
A senior European official told journalists late Thursday that among “four or five” issues still under dispute by the US and Iran was Tehran’s progress in uranium enrichment. Complicating technical issues in returning Iran’s nuclear program to JCPOA limits, Tehran has not only employed advanced centrifuges barred under the JCPOA but acquired knowledge and expertise in their use – including when enriching to 60 percent purity, far above the 3.67 percent JCPOA cap, and close to the 90 percent considered ‘weapons grade.’
‘Tattered allegations’
Another niggling issue is questions raised by the IAEA over Iran’s pre-2003 nuclear work. It has been widely reported Iranian negotiators have argued in Vienna any probe be shelved. Israeli journalist Barak Ravid tweeted he had been told by European officials that Iran was making “unrealistic demands” outside the scope of the JCPOA.
In an interview with Iran’s Arabic-language TV station al-Alam published Friday, Mohammad Eslami, head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, said that agreement could be reached in Vienna if “the West…abandon their false excuses…tattered allegations and alleged documents…”
The IAEA in a 2015 report Final Assessment on Past and Present Outstanding Issues regarding Iran’s Nuclear Program found that weapons-linked work done by Iran before 2003 “did not advance beyond feasibility and scientific studies.” But in 2018 Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed on the basis of documents allegedly removed by Israel from Iran that the pre-2003 work had been more advanced that the IAEA realized.
The agency has lacked access to the documents. But after agency inspectors found uranium traces at sites linked to the pre-2003 work and IAEA director-general Rafael Mariano Grossi deemed Iran’s answers unsatisfactory, the agency’s board in June censured Iran with a resolution raised by France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Red lines and consultations
Speaking in Cambodia, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Tehran was “absolutely legitimate” in demanding a restoration “without exceptions” of the JCPOA as signed in 2015 and then approved by the United Nations Security Council. Lavrov suggested the US was now trying to amend the agreement.
Iran International’s correspondent in Vienna, Ahmad Samadi reported that Lavrov’s words have had a negative impact on the atmosphere in Vienna.
Iran’s foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said Friday in Tehran that Iran sought “economic benefit from the deal, observing the country’s red lines, and preserving our indigenous nuclear capacity.”
While the current Vienna talks, which began Thursday, have been widely called “last ditch,” and while Borrell argued in a Financial Times piece published July 26 that “the space for additional significant compromises has been exhausted,” previous rounds in the Austrian capital – which began April 2021 and paused March 2022 – have ended with negotiators returning to their capitals for further consultations.
The official Iranian news agency IRNA was moved to cite “an informed source close to Iran’s negotiating team” denying a Wall Street Journal report that Tehran had dropped its demand that the United States remove Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) from its list of ‘foreign terrorist organizations.’
The designation – made by President Donald Trump in 2019 – has been widely reported as a stumbling block in the talks, which began in April last year, but it is caught up in wider issues of Iran’s access to world trade as stipulated by the 2015 agreement, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).
The Wall Street Journal’s formulation that Iran is “still calling for stronger guarantees that Washington won’t abandon the pact again or reimpose sanctions on Tehran” suggests Iran might swallow the FTO designation in return for other US concessions.
IRNA’s source said the onus lay with the US to “take advantage of the opportunity JCPOA participants have offered.” The US left the JCPOA in 2018 and will part in the Vienna talks indirectly, with Iran refusing to meet face-to-face.
Sword of Damocles
There have been wide reports that Iran is insisting on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) dropping enquiries into uranium traces found in sites used before 2003 and undisclosed to the agency as nuclear-related.
Mohammad Marandi, advisor-cum-spokesman to Iranian negotiators, tweeted Thursday that the IAEA could “no longer be used as the sword of Damocles.” Iran and the IAEA are at odds over explanations Iran has given over the pre-2003 work, with the agency’s dissatisfaction prompting France, Germany, the UK, and the US to successfully move a resolution at the agency’s governing board in June censuring Iran.
In Tehran, Mohammad Eslami, Iran’s nuclear chief, told IRNA that Iran had no reason to respect JCPOA nuclear limits, given the deal was “quasi-obsolete,” and that it expected an end to “false claims,” a reference to the pre-2003 work.
In his tweet Marandi highlighted Iran’s demand for guarantees that the US and Europeans respect Iran’s access to world markets as required under the JCPOA, suggesting they could not hope to both restore the 2015 deal and “keep a wrecking ball at hand…able to expand the sanctions regime at will.”
Which sanctions are ‘nuclear related,’ and which are not, has been a central theme of talks, both in Vienna, where the process paused in March, and in a bilateral US-Iran round in Qatar June mediated by the European Union.
Asl and Bagheri Kani active
Mohsen Naziri Asl, Iran’s recently appointed ambassador to the IAEA, emerged Thursday in Vienna as a leading participant, while Iran’s chief negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani met Enrique Mora, the EU chair of the talks, and the Russian IAEA ambassador Mikhail Ulyanov, who in past rounds of negotiations has been an enthusiastic tweeter.
Previous Vienna talks followed a format where remaining JCPOA signatories – China, France, Germany, Iran, Russia, and the United Kingdom – met formally under JCPOA auspices, with the US participating indirectly. There were also constant bilateral meetings of various parties - other than between Iran and US, as Iran refuses to meet US diplomats.
The resumption of talks in Vienna, surprising observers after a five-month gap, comes after EU foreign policy chief Josep Borell circulated in late July a written text outlining a possible path to agreement.
Washington confirmed Wednesday that Rob Malley, its chief negotiator and special Iran envoy, would be in Vienna. Malley tweeted that while he welcomed “a good faith attempt to reach a deal,” US “expectations are in check.”
According to information obtained by Iran International, Saeed Borji is working to develop nuclear detonators for the ministry’s Organization of Defensive Innovation and Research -- or SPND.
A protege of the once-top Iranian nuclear weapons scientist and a senior member of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh -- who was assassinated in November 2020 – Borji runs a front company named Azar Afrouz Saeed Engineering Company, specializing in explosives. The company is a subsidiary of SPND.
The explosives and metals expert for Shahid Karimi Group, also a subsidiary of SPND, has been associated with "possible military dimensions of the Iranian nuclear program," according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and has assisted SPND’s efforts to procure equipment used for containing explosions.
Borji, who has a PhD in chemical engineering from Malek Ashtar University of Technology, has previously worked in Parchin military complex with Russian-born former Soviet scientist Vyacheslav Danilenko – with an extensive expertise in the development of nuclear detonators – and Vladimir Padalko on projects about explosive chambers for nuclear weapons.
The Abadeh site is an important site for conducting large-scale high explosive tests for developing nuclear weapons under the Amad Plan, which was Iran’s project during the early 2000s to build five nuclear weapons and later was reoriented to a smaller, better camouflaged nuclear weapons program. Abadeh was first identified as a weapons site in October 2019 by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The site was built in the mid-1990s by companies controlled by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
The Abadeh site also called Marivan site in the southwestern Fars province, is one of the places that the IAEA found traces of undeclared uranium and demanded explanation from the Islamic Republic. Iran said the origin of the particles is "unknown" and insisted the site was used for "the exploitation of fireclay through a contract with a foreign company decades ago."
Borji was sanction by the United States on March 22, 2019 as a Specially Designated National (SDN) by the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) pursuant to Executive Order 13382, which targets proliferators of weapons of mass destruction and their delivery system.
Late in July, two Telegram channels with links to IRGC suggested that Iran may build nuclear warheads “in the shortest possible time” if attacked by the US or Israel, which has repeatedly threatened in recent months to use all means at its disposal to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear threat, and has said its armed forces are preparing for action if necessary.
“The nuclear facilities of Fordow have been built deep under mountains of Iran and are protected against trench-busting bombs and even nuclear explosion… all infrastructures required for nuclear breakout have been prepared in it,” the video by Bisimchi Media (Radioman Media) Telegram channel said while adding that the facilities at Natanz may be highly vulnerable to a possible attack by Western powers and Israel but Fordow will immediately assume war footing and begin the nuclear breakout project within a short time if Natanz comes under missile attack.
EMAD, another form of an earlier weapons program, AMAD, refers to Iran’s purported secret nuclear effort, which started in 1989 under the leadership of Fakhrizadeh and according to the UN nuclear watchdog IAEA, stopped in 2003. According to a IAEA director general’s report in 2015, Iran specifically denied the existence of the AMAD Plan and the ‘Orchid Office’ as elements of such a program.
Iran has now enough uranium enriched to 60 percent purity and if further enriched to 90 percent, the fissile material will be sufficient for a nuclear bomb within a few weeks.