CHRISTOPHER DICKEY, DAILY BEAST
Current and former U.S. intelligence officials and Iran watchers said they were “pleasantly surprised” by the deal, noting that more details were put on paper than they’d expected, and that they saw more concessions from Iran than they thought were possible given that the talks in recent days appeared headed toward a stalemate.
“I think that [the negotiators] were able to specify enough detail in this agreement to justify the effort to continue another three months and try to complete a comprehensive agreement,” Gary Samore, Obama’s former coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction, told The Daily Beast.
Samore cautioned that many technical details remain to be worked out, including (crucially) what the mechanism will be for additional inspections and monitoring measures to ensure that Iran is living up to its end of the deal.
In Iran, there was dancing in the streets as people heard the arrangement would end all sanctions related to the country’s nuclear program.
It will be a miracle, in fact, if the deal outlined today can be wrapped up by the end of June, the deadline that’s been announced. Not only are the technical details to be resolved enormous and complicated, attacks on the whole process are likely to be relentless.
On one side are those in Washington who think no deal with Iran is satisfactory unless it results in complete capitulation by Tehran (and, they hope, the fall of the regime there). On the other are those in Iran who believe the best long-term guarantee for their security is the threat they will present as a “nuclear threshold state,” able to build atomic weapons on short notice, even if they choose not to do so.
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| Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei |
The most critical question is not whether Iran can be trusted. Its history of nuclear deceit shows that is a dubious proposition, even if, for the record, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has issued a fatwa against building nuclear weapons. The critical question is whether the agreements being hammered out now will allow the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to discover any Iranian attempts to build a bomb in time to stop it.
In a briefing with reporters, senior administration officials insisted that inspectors would be allowed full coverage of the “supply chain” that Iran could use to build a weapon, and that they’d be able to uncover any covert activity. But one senior official acknowledged that Iranian negotiators still have to sell the deal back in Tehran, just as U.S. officials will face a skeptical Congress when they return to Washington.
“If Iran cheats, the world will know it,” Obama declared. “If we see something suspicious, we will inspect it. Iran’s past efforts to weaponize its program will be addressed. With this deal, Iran will face more inspections than any other country in the world.”
But he added: “Iran is not going to simply dismantle its program because we demand it to do so. That’s not how the world works, and that’s not what history shows us.” Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, for his part, said that while Iran will abide by the deal, “our facilities will continue.”
The rest of the current understanding is essentially about scaling back Iran’s production of nuclear fuel so that it cannot “break out”—that is, renege on its treaty obligations, oust inspectors, and build a nuclear bomb—in less than a year. As things stand now, without the deal in place, Obama said, “estimates indicated that Iran is only two or three months away from potentially acquiring the raw materials that could be used for a single nuclear bomb.” By comparison, a year is a better deal, but it’s still not a great deal.
Still, Samore said there were two notable “big wins” for the United States and its partners in the talks: The facility at Fordow will be “neutralized” for the next 15 years, and a facility that had been under construction at Arak will effectively be put out of the nuclear weapons-making business all together.
So, here’s the good news from the point of view of the United States and the five other countries—France, Great Britain, Germany, Russia and China—that participated in the negotiations:
• Iran has agreed to reduce by about two-thirds the number of centrifuges it has installed to enrich uranium, and not to enrich above the level of 3.67 percent for the next 15 years. To be useful in a bomb, the enrichment level has to be closer to 85 percent. Everything else will be put in storage and locked up by the IAEA, and Iran won’t build any new facilities for the purpose of enriching uranium for 15 years.
• The deal blocks another pathway to the Bomb—plutonium from Iran’s heavy water reactor at Arak. The core of that facility is going to be replaced so that no weapons grade plutonium can be produced. Additionally, no new heavy water reactor will be built for 15 years.
• To the extent that uranium enrichment continues, it is supposed to be conducted at only one facility, Natanz, which was kept secret until 2002 but is now the main enrichment plant. At the moment Iran has about 19,000 operational centrifuges for enrichment. For the next 10 years it will be able to use 5,060 of the oldest ones.
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| Fordow nuclear site |
But the deal concerning another facility at Fordow, which is buried deep inside a mountain and theoretically invulnerable to attack from the air, is more problematic. Iran has agreed not to enrich uranium or have any fissile material there for 15 years. Instead it is supposed to be a “nuclear, physics, technology, research center,” according to the White House.
Critics of the deal already say the administration should have demanded that Fordow be shut down completely. The idea that a facility hardened against bunker buster bombs is just a research center strikes them as, to say the least, implausible.
The other area where it is essential but difficult to hold Iran accountable is on the question of what are called the PMDs, or the possible military dimensions, of its programs. For much of the last decade the IAEA has been trying to get Iran to explain intelligence that suggested it had a hidden weapons program, and its response has been to insist the intelligence was fabricated. Critics of the Iran negotiations are concerned that the administration will allow sanctions relief for Iran to begin before Tehran has offered a satisfactory explanation.
So, now that the Obama administration has managed to come to a political framework, attention turns to Congress, which is scheduled to consider legislation requiring additional congressional input into the deal.
“There is concern among some Democrats that the administration will sell a bad deal as passable, just for the sake of having a deal,” a senior Democratic aide told The Daily Beast.
Sen. Bob Corker, (R., Tenn.) [above], chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee says the Foreign Relations Committee will vote on April 14, just after lawmakers return from an Easter recess, on the Corker-Menendez bill, a piece of legislation that would force a congressional review of any Iranian nuclear deal. The bill already has nine Democratic cosponsors, and the presumed support of all 54 Republican senators, putting it [four short] of a veto-proof majority. He said Thursday he expects a strong vote in favor of the measure.
The White House has threatened to veto bills aimed at giving Congress an up-or-down vote on the final deal, as well as legislation that would impose additional sanctions on Iran.
But Menendez, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, has come under immense scrutiny because of his recent indictment on federal corruption charges. After they were filed against him this week, he stepped down as the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, limiting his influence over the course of the legislation.