VIENNA The effort to negotiate a comprehensive solution to the Iranian nuclear issue began in earnest on Tuesday, with Iranian negotiators meeting one on one with officials of the United States and other major world powers.Senior Iranian officials said on Tuesday that they were ready for long and complicated negotiations, but that Iran would not accept the dismantling of its nuclear facilities. Abbas Araghchi, Irans deputy foreign minister and deputy nuclear negotiator, told reporters here that the talks had started well, but that to us, what has been announced as dismantling Irans program and facilities is not on the agenda.
But American officials have said that they foresee Iran having to dismantle a significant amount of its nuclear infrastructure related to uranium enrichment as part of any final deal.
Little substantive news emerged on the first day of the three days of talks, which are intended to arrange an agenda and program to try to resolve all the complicated technical, political, financial and military aspects of Irans confrontation with the United Nations Security Council over Tehrans nuclear program before the end of July.
To that end, Mr. Araghchi and the American lead negotiator, Wendy R. Sherman, met for 80 minutes, a senior American official said. The two sides then had a lengthy plenary session before adjourning for the night.
Irans chief negotiator, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, speaking via Skype to a University of Denver symposium, said that the talks started on the right track and that we have a shared objective, and that is for Iran to have a nuclear program that is exclusively peaceful.
He said that talk of new sanctions in Washington, resisted by the Obama administration, has created a great deal of concern in Iran on whether the U.S. is serious about wanting to reach an agreement.
Tehran insists that its nuclear enrichment has only peaceful aims. The six powers negotiating with it the United States, France, Britain, Russia and China, the five permanent members of the Security Council, plus Germany want to ensure that Irans enrichment is so constrained that it cannot break out quickly to produce enough fissile material for a bomb, whether made from uranium or plutonium.
That negotiating effort is likely to focus on some equation between the amount and quality of Irans stockpile of enriched uranium and the number and sophistication of the centrifuges it possesses. Iran is thought to have 19,000 centrifuges of varying quality, of which only 10,000 are working.
While Iran insists that it has the right to keep developing and installing more sophisticated centrifuges and intends to do so, Western officials will be trying in the talks to come up with an agreement on how many centrifuges, and what kind, can be functioning under international inspection, even if many of the older machines are not destroyed.
Under aninterim six-month accord, which took effect in January and is intended to buy time for the final settlement talks, Iran committed to not installing any new centrifuges and to limiting its enrichment of uranium to 3.5-percent purity, while turning its stock of 20-percent enriched uranium into fuel bricks or oxide that cannot easily be further enriched.
Mr. Araghchi told Iranian reporters here that a comprehensive agreement was a big task, and we have long and complicated negotiations ahead of us. On Monday, Irans supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that the nuclear negotiations will lead nowhere, but that he would not block them.
The six-month accord expires on July 20, with the possibility that both sides will agree to extend it.
But a senior American official said that it was important to push to get an agreement sooner rather than later, and that it would be clear by July, in any case, whether Iran is serious about reaching a deal.
By The New York Times
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