April 02, 2015

A victory for diplomacy

located:	Iran
editor:	Ama Lorenz

It took eight days and eight nights before the United States, Iran and five other world powers could announce an understanding outlining limits on Iran’s nuclear program. In times when international crisis are solved preferably with weapons this framework, negotiated in Lausanne (Switzerland) sets a sign -diplomacy can work. The relief of some negotiators was obvious when they read out the joint statement last night. The European Union foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini called it a “decisive step” after more than a decade of negotiations. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif followed with the same statement in Farsi. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and the top diplomats of Britain, France and Germany also briefly took the stage behind them.

The framework deal is a diplomatic compromise and requires Iran to surrender some crucial components of its nuclear program, in return for primarily economic concessions:

Iran will give up about 14,000 of its 20,000 centrifuges and all of its most rudimentary, outdated. The first-generation IR-1s, knock-offs of 1970s European models, are all Iran gets to keep. It will not be allowed to build or develop newer models.
The plutonium plant at Arak will be destroyed or its core exported and replaced with a new core that cannot produce weapons-grade plutonium. All spent nuclear fuel will be shipped out.
Only 300 kilograms of Iran’s 10,000 kilograms of enriched uranium Iran is allowed to hold. That means only 3 percent of its stockpile will be left.

The result of this agreement would mean: not much of Iran’s nuclear program is left. Still, Iran is allowed to keep a small nuclear program, and it won some concessions of its own. For example, what little uranium enrichment is allowed will be done at Iran's facility at Natanz — a hardened, reinforced-concrete structure that was once used for covert enrichment and that the US had hoped to close, as well as the research facility at Fordow. These are not big concessions, and they matter mostly for their symbolic value, but it's something.

The biggest steps were made in terms of the inspections and Iran’s agreement to to comply by a rule known as Modified Code 3.1 of the Subsidiary Arrangements General Part to Iran's Safeguards Agreement, shorthanded as Modified Code 3.1.

After the deal was announced there were spontaneous street parties in the Iranian capital Tehran. According to eyewitnesses, tens of thousands, mostly young people, celebrated throughout the city. But German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned of elation, it was too early. A new June 30th deadline has been set to work out the final details. However, there were significant obstacles out of the way for an agreement. Above all, the Republican led Congress can still block the envisaged agreement. That would be a setback for the international diplomacy and first of all for a peaceful solution in the dispute over Iran's nuclear program after twelve years.