WALL ST JOURNAL
Top Obama administration officials entered negotiations with Iran in September 2013 hoping to dismantle most of the country’s nuclear infrastructure—but carrying gnawing doubts such an outcome was possible. Those concerns were quickly confirmed when U.S. and Iranian diplomats sat down for their first formal meeting the following month at the United Nations offices near the shores of Lake Geneva.
Iranian negotiators made clear that a dismantling of their facilities, including eliminating tens of thousands of centrifuge machines, a plutonium-producing reactor and an underground fuel-production site, wasn’t feasible, senior U.S. officials said. “It’s our moon shot,” Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told a U.S. official at one point, arguing that the program’s economic and scientific benefits were that important to Iranian society and national pride.
The White House decided a less ambitious agreement would be pursued. “As soon as we got into the real negotiations with them, we understood that any final deal was going to involve some domestic enrichment capability,” a senior U.S. official said, referring to the production of nuclear fuel, which has both civilian and military uses.
Crucially, the goal of the talks shifted—away from dismantling structures and toward a more complex set of limitations designed to extend the time Iran would need to “break out” and make a dash toward a nuclear weapon.
That early yield would set the tone of the negotiations to come, with the U.S. making steady concessions over the course of the talks. But the Iranians also took steps—mothballing thousands of centrifuge machines, expanding the role of U.N. inspectors and diminishing its stockpile of fissile material—that many experts doubted they would.
While negotiations initially focused on substantially reshaping Iran’s overall program, the aim shifted to trying to deny Iran the ability to quickly “break out” from any restrictions and accumulate enough weapons-grade fuel for a bomb. U.S. scientists concluded that 12 months was enough time for the West to detect any moves by Tehran to assemble a bomb and to respond. Negotiators began focusing on that goal.
“We understood as soon as we got into a serious negotiation with them that at the end of the day they were going to have to have some domestic capacity because there’s no other deal that they’d say ‘yes’ to,” said the senior U.S. official who was briefed on negotiations.
As talks proceeded past two deadlines last year, the U.S. agreed to a stream of concessions. The American positions at times drew ire from other negotiating powers, particularly France, and U.S. officials acknowledged publicly for the first time that a final deal would leave many of Iran’s nuclear sites in place.
....during a series of meetings in Europe, Iran signaled a willingness to make a vital shift, according to senior Western diplomats.he U.S. had for more than a year insisted that a final deal needed to put Iran at least a year away from being able to amass enough nuclear fuel for a bomb. In those January meetings, Iranian officials began asking questions about exactly what such a condition would entail.
By the time the world’s top diplomats gathered in Munich in early February for a security conference, the U.S. got clear word that Iran was willing to accept a deal structured around the one-year demand, said one of the diplomats in the talks.
From there, other stalled pieces began to fall into place.
Negotiators homed in on the number of centrifuges Iran would be allowed to operate—and Iran finally agreed to reduce them to 5,060. U.S. officials acknowledged in February that while they were aiming for a deal that would last 15 years or more, Iran would be able to scale up its enrichment activities and possibly its nuclear research in the final years of a deal.
When negotiators gathered in Switzerland in mid-March, enrichment had been pushed down the list of issues to resolve. But political pressure on Mr. Obama was as intense as it had been since talks began in 2013. U.S. lawmakers were moving toward a veto-proof bipartisan majority to override Mr. Obama’s promised veto of legislation that would give Congress the authority to approve or reject a deal. Mr. Obama’s relations with Israel were in tatters after its increasingly shrill denunciation of the deal being negotiated.