BICOM

Iran has backed away from a key previously-agreed point of a nuclear deal with the P5+1 powers, according to a report in this morning’s New York Times.

According to the report, Iran has now refused to export its enriched uranium abroad.

Since early on in the nuclear negotiations, Iran had indicated it was willing to ship its enriched uranium abroad to Russia in return for nuclear fuel rods, which generate electricity in a power plant but can’t be used to make a bomb. Yesterday, Iran’s deputy Foreign Minister told journalists that the country was ruling out exporting the uranium.

Despite the hardening of the Iranian position, a deal remains possible, with Western diplomats seeming to accept the new demand. Several wire reports claimed that a deal was imminent throughout Sunday – a claim denied in Iranian media.

Tuesday night is the deadline for a ‘framework’ deal which would enable the parties to produce a full agreement by the hard deadline of the end of June. However, on Friday, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond indicated that the framework deal might be only an oral “narrative” rather than agreement, and might not even feature an agreed joint statement between Iran and the P5+1 (the USA, UK, France, Germany, Russia and China).

Hammond told journalists, “We envisage being able to deliver a narrative. Whether that is written down or not, I don’t think is the crucial issue … This will be a political statement, or perhaps political statements from the [parties] and Iran which create enough momentum to make it clear that we’ve now got this boulder over the hill and we are into the detailed work to produce an agreement.”

According to a report in Politico, Mr Hammond said “The challenge is: as soon as you write anything down, you’ve got to write everything down”

This echoes remarks by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, who has said that a written partial agreement from the March talks was unacceptable.

Differences remain between the P5+1 and Iran, most notably on the question of sanctions relief. Iran wants immediate sanctions relief after an agreement, while the USA and EU countries prefer a gradual lifting of sanctions based on Iranian compliance.

One possible outcome of the current talks would be a sufficiently-open ‘framework’ that defers any major issues of disagreement until the next round of talks in June. However, this option would risk the US Congress choosing to impose additional sanctions on Iran in the meantime.