Kerry says ‘too early’ to tell if Iran deal sealed

VIENNA — US Secretary of State John Kerry warned Monday it was too soon to tell if a nuclear deal with Iran is possible as he awaited the return of Iran’s foreign minister from consultations in Tehran.

“We’re just working and it’s too early to make any judgements,” Kerry told reporters in Vienna following a weekend of intense talks with counterparts from five other major powers and Iran.

He was meeting with Yukiya Amano, the head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which will have a crucial role in verifying Iran’s claims that its nuclear programme is purely peaceful and also to make sure it does not cheat in the future.

More contentiously, the IAEA wants to investigate claims that before 2003 and possibly since Iran carried out nuclear weapons development work — something denied by Iran — and to be able to probe any such claims in the future.

A senior US administration official stressed that global powers were not asking for access to every military site.

“The entry point isn’t we must be able to get into every military site, because the United States of America wouldn’t allow anybody to get into every military site, so that’s not appropriate,” the official told reporters.

“There are conventional purposes, and there are secrets that any country has that they are not willing to share.”

But the official said global powers had proposed a way forward as part of parameters agreed in Lausanne on April 2 “that we believe will ensure that the IAEA has the access it needs”.

In a possible sign of progress, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he would arrive in Vienna on Tuesday, coinciding with the expected return of his Iranian opposite member Mohammad Javad Zarif, who had flown home Sunday night for consultations.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, speaking in New York, said he would be back in the Austrian capital this week. It was unclear when his British, German or Chinese counterparts might follow suit.

In April, Iran and the P5+1 group — the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany — agreed on the main outlines of a deal hoping to end a 13-year stand-off over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Under the framework, Iran will dramatically scale down its atomic activities in order to make any drive to make a weapon — an ambition it denies having — all but impossible.

This includes slashing the number of centrifuges enriching uranium, which can be used for nuclear fuel but also in a bomb, reducing its uranium stockpile and modifying a planned reactor at Arak.

In return, the powers have said they will progressively ease sanctions that have suffocated Iran’s economy, while retaining the option to reimpose them if Iran violates the agreement.

Sticking to the parameters 

The US official said now teams were hard at work trying to thrash out the exact details of how to put the April framework into operation.

But turning the 505-word joint statement agreed in April in Lausanne, Switzerland into a fully-fledged, highly technical document of several dozen pages, accompanied by several annexes, has proved challenging.

“It sounds easy, but it’s difficult,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Sunday.

The US official dismissed as “absurd” allegations that Kerry and his team were going to cave on some of the hardest issues, but warned “there are real and tough issues that remain which have to be resolved”.

“It is certainly possible to get a deal here. We do see a path forward to get a comprehensive agreement that meets our bottom lines, and this path forward has to be based on the Lausanne parameters,” the official said.

Other key sticking points are thought to include the pace and timing of sanctions relief, the mechanism for their possible “snapback” and Iran’s future development of newer, faster centrifuges.

“I think the asymmetry here is that Iran clearly needs this deal. They’re haemorrhaging hundreds of billions because of sanctions, tens of billions because of the drop in oil prices and billions trying to sustain the Assad regime [in Syria],” said analyst Karim Sadjadpour at Carnegie Endowment.