When senior officials from six of the world’s most important nations last sat down with Saeed Jalili (pictured above), Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, they were presented with a two-page document billed as Tehran’s proposal for negotiations. Written in English, it included spelling mistakes and dealt with a range of issues – except the one issue big powers wanted to talk about: Iran’s nuclear programme.
During the July 2008 discussions in Geneva, Mr Jalili remained evasive, refusing to address directly the international offer on the table – that Tehran halt its uranium enrichment programme in return for freezing of additional UN sanctions as a condition for starting broader negotiations. Frustrated officials headed home empty-handed. The US representative was said to have reported back that Washington had not missed much by consciously absenting itself from earlier negotiations with Tehran.
Now, more than a year on, both sides are preparing to talk once again. Since Geneva much has changed in both the US and Iran – in addition to which the challenge confronting the world’s big powers over the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme is even more acute, making diplomatic efforts, no matter how frustrating, still more important.
An administration eager to talk to its enemies has taken over in Washington; in Tehran an election crisis has torn apart society and shaken the regime more severely than at any time since the state was founded in 1979.
Iran’s nuclear programme, meanwhile, has steadily advanced. There have been no new talks with Tehran, and no agreement on a new round of UN sanctions. Instead, there are growing fears that Israel could strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, a move that risks igniting a regional war and spurring Tehran to step up work on a bomb.
Western officials acknowledge that Tehran is now closer than ever to developing nuclear weapons, despite years of efforts to stop it acquiring such a capability. Having all but lost that battle, the goal of preventing it from actually building a device is all the more important.
“Part of what [US president Barack] Obama is trying to do is to stop Iran from tipping towards a decision to build all-out nuclear weapons,” says David Albright from the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.
Fission mission
Iran’s nuclear programme has been a source of international concern since August 2002, when an opposition group revealed details. Initially Tehran suspended uranium enrichment, fearing the global response. In January 2006, however, it resumed the process and United Nations sanctions followed.
In July 2008 the US for the first time joined other world powers in a face-to-face diplomatic meeting with Iran’s nuclear negotiator but the effort led nowhere. This year Iran amassed enough low-enriched uranium to form the basis for one nuclear bomb.
As a result the six nations that have led efforts to curb Iran’s programme – the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany – and Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, are preparing for another meeting, next week, with the elusive Mr Jalili.
The participants are approaching the day and a half of talks – due to start on October 1 in an undisclosed European city – with low expectations. There is also suspicion that Tehran’s motive for taking part is less about negotiating than about preventing any move towards sanctions at meetings at the UN and the Group of 20 leading nations summit this week.
“The text sent by Iran is similar [to last year’s], a bit longer and more verbose,” says one European diplomat. “But we’re taking a political decision to say, thank you for your text and now let’s sit down and talk. Engagement is a necessity, not a concession.”
Indeed, perhaps encouraged by hints from Manouchehr Mottaki, the Iranian foreign minister who handed the proposal to ambassadors in Tehran, that at some stage the nuclear programme could be brought into the talks, world powers are hoping an agenda that includes the concerns of both sides might be agreed.
For the US and Iran, next week’s meeting is above all an opportunity to test each other’s intentions. Both countries have gone through sweeping change – part of it favouring engagement, part of it working against it. “The point is to meet and explain to the Iranians, face to face, the choices that Iran has, and to see whether Iran is prepared to engage with us around its nuclear programme,” Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, said last week. “[But] we are not going to be talking for the sake of talking.”
Iran nuclear timeline
Interactive: A timeline of Iran’s nuclear programme from its beginnings under the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in the 1950s to the present-day Islamic republic and a look at agreements, sanctions and US involvement
But if the US attitude towards Iran has softened Tehran’s position, if anything, has hardened. Mr Jalili still answers to the same boss: supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose appetite for engagement has always been doubtful. Iran’s senior decision-maker, moreover, now rules over a damaged regime, weakened by the alleged rigging of the June election in favour of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, the radical president.
The election has blown away some assumptions about Iran, not least that Mr Khamenei’s own views might be more moderate than those of the fundamentalist president. He sided with Mr Ahmadi-Nejad in the election and appears to appreciate the president’s belligerence on the nuclear front, assuming it has strengthened Iran’s hand. Meanwhile, the more pragmatic voices in the regime, many of them grouped around Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president, are now a target of the security crackdown.
The only assumption that endures is that Iran is not likely to contemplate a deal on its nuclear programme unless it includes continued uranium enrichment. Regime insiders have privately suggested in the past, however, that in return for economic and political incentives – an offer that world powers have made in the past and that remains on the table today – Tehran could be prepared to provide guarantees its programme would remain peaceful.
Ali Akbar Javanfekr, a senior aide to Mr Ahmadi-Nejad, told Agence France-Presse that accepting Iran as a nuclear power was the first step to normalising relations. “We have the technology. This is the reality which they must understand,” he said. “Had we not achieved enough mastering of technology the situation would have been different.”
Many of the facts on the ground strengthen Iran’s position. Glyn Davies, US ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s watchdog, said this month Tehran was near to possessing, or already in possession of, sufficient low-enriched uranium to produce one nuclear weapon if further enriched. In a worst-case scenario Iran could produce enough fissile material for a bomb within six months, says Mr Albright. But US officials argue that in practical terms Iran is at least one to two years away from a bomb, even if decides to develop a weapon.
Analysts warn an air strike against the programme would be ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst if, as some expect, Iran has clandestine nuclear facilities that could be hidden from attack. Washington appears to agree: the Obama administration has explicitly warned Israel several times against attacking.
“My personal view is that it will be impossible to find a solution that does not involve some degree of enrichment on Iranian soil,” says Mark Fitzpatrick from the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies. In return, he says, Tehran would have to accept a more intrusive inspections regime by the IAEA.
Some US administration officials had previously contemplated such a compromise as part of a final agreement. But the Iranian election crisis and the radicalisation of the regime could make it more politically costly for Mr Obama to accept any deal including enrichment. US and European diplomats insist halting uranium enrichment is the only guarantee Iran will not produce nuclear weapons.
The election dispute has also complicated the direct bilateral engagement started by the Obama administration and crucial to assuaging Tehran’s paranoia about US intentions. As people across the world watched the images of the post-election crackdown, pressure grew on Mr Obama to denounce Iran – as eventually he did – and to scale down his earlier talk of extending his hand to the Islamic Republic.
“The Iranian election has made things profoundly more difficult, quite possibly insurmountably difficult,” says Ray Takeyh, until recently a senior US State department adviser on Iran. “There’s a political class in Iran that seems disinclined to compromise and actually sees virtue in defiance.”
Mr Obama’s room for manoeuvre is also greatly diminished by domestic constraints, not least his battle over healthcare.
US officials say the progress of any talks with Iran will be assessed, as Mr Obama has already announced, at the end of this year. If Tehran shows no flexibility, the US will redouble efforts to convince the UN and, perhaps more significantly, the EU to impose a new round of sanctions.
“It’s true that Russians and Chinese are reluctant to impose new Security Council sanctions,” says a US official. ‘But the brutal repression by Iranian authorities after the election has contributed to a toughening of attitudes on the part of many countries, especially Europeans.”
Mr Obama has already expressed hope that his decision last week to quash missile defence plans in central Europe could bring about greater Russian co-operation on Iran as a “by-product” or “bonus”. Robert Gates, US secretary of defence, argues that the new focus of the missile defence scheme on countering Iranian short and medium-range missiles could reassure Israel, the country most threatened by such missiles, and so convince its leaders “that there is still time for diplomacy and ... sanctions”.
US officials add that the continuing discussion of sanctions both in New York and in the US Congress may push international companies to leave Iran, much as many foreign banks have in recent years.
Mr Obama has also stepped up an argument based on Iran’s self-interest, making the point that Tehran would lose out as much any other country from a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. If, as some western diplomats have long argued, Iran wants to have nuclear weapons within reach only technically – rather than actually to explode a bomb – such an argument could take hold.
But there is little prospect of rapid progress. Mr Takeyh notes there is not much time before the US revisits its entire strategy at the end of the year – and he questions the idea that “economic stress will cause Iran to move on a core foreign policy issue within the time frame allotted”.
Meanwhile, the stakes continue to rise. Iran insists it has no intention of developing nuclear weapons and the US judged in 2007 that Tehran had suspended related work in 2003. Recent allegations of past Iranian work on fitting nuclear material on to a warhead – contained in internal documents at the UN’s nuclear watchdog – have heightened western fears that Iran has resumed such efforts. But the US, smarting at its intelligence failure over Iraq, has yet to be convinced.
“The Iranians have such a capability now that it is really just a matter of them deciding what to do,” says Mr Albright. “They may not decide to build a bomb. That’s part of the game.”
The ball next week will be very much in Mr Jalili’s court.
................................................................................................
Divided on when weapon will be – agreed that it is close
How far away is Iran from building and deploying a nuclear weapon? The question continues to divide western governments and experts, writes James Blitz. Although the Islamic Republic insists its nuclear programme is to provide power for civil purposes, there is little doubt it is acquiring the capability to construct a weapon. The discrepancy is over whether it is close to completing that work – as Israel seems to think – or whether it is still several years away.
On two aspects of the programme there is broad agreement among western governments. First, Iran has now manufactured enough low-enriched uranium at its Natanz facility to form the basis for at least one weapon; by next February it should have enough for two. Second, it is making progress in developing ballistic missiles that could transport a weapon to Israel and other Middle East states, even if it is far from developing intercontinental capability.
The big differences among foreign governments are over a third aspect of Iran’s activity – “weaponisation”. To acquire nuclear weapons capability it must go through the demanding process of designing a warhead then fitting it to a missile. According to a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate published by the US, Iran halted this procedure in 2003. However, Israel is reported to believe it was secretly resumed in 2005 on the orders of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, supreme leader. In Israel’s view this means the world could receive little or no warning before Iran announces it has full nuclear weapons capability.
Last week fresh light was thrown on the weaponisation issue with the publication by Associated Press of an unseen document compiled by officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency. It shows that Iran worked on developing a chamber inside a ballistic missile capable of housing a warhead payload “that is quite likely to be nuclear”. It also shows Iran engaged in “probable testing” of explosives commonly used to detonate a nuclear warhead. The document does not say when this weaponisation work took place.
For all that, Israel and the US are broadly in agreement about when Tehran could produce a deliverable weapon. The official US estimate is between 2010 and 2015. Mossad, the Israeli spy agency, believes it will be 2014. Either way, the timescale is short enough to make the Iran file a critical one in world diplomacy.
