The New York Times has also heard, as Axios reported earlier Monday, that the U.S. wanted a 20-year enrichment ban in the talks over the weekend. Iran has responded with an offer to stop for up a quarter of that time:
During the peace negotiations in Islamabad over the weekend, the United States asked Iran for a 20-year suspension of uranium enrichment. The Iranians, in a formal response sent on Monday, said they would agree to up to five years, according to two senior Iranian officials and one U.S. official. Trump has rejected that offer, the U.S. official said.
The official said the U.S. has also asked Iran to remove highly enriched uranium from the country, and the Iranians have insisted the fuel stays inside Iran. But they have offered to dilute it significantly, so that it could not be used to produce a nuclear weapon. (The risk is that the Iranians would still have possession of the fuel and in the future might be able to re-enrich it to bomb grade.)
Here’s what the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s Eric Brewer had to say about the enrichment ban reports earlier Monday:
1. Iran reportedly countered with a “single digit” period for no enrichment. That could be anywhere from 1 year to 9 years. Obviously the latter is much better than the former. But as was true under the JCPOA and is true now, a lot depends on what other enrichment-related activities Iran can carry out in this timeframe. Presumably Iran will want to have a facility constructed and ready to go whenever the sunset arrives, which could mean building and testing machines beforehand.
2. The Iranians were also open to a “monitored process of down-blending.” In general, that’s fine. How Iran gets rid of its 60% and 20% matters less than the fact that they do it. Though notably, the details here on precisely what was being downblended were left out.
Of course, there’s lots of important issues left unaddressed here – monitoring and verification, reprocessing, and weaponization, to name a few. How will those feature in a deal? Also, what scale of sanctions relief are we talking about here? My guess is there’s a very high asking price (primary sanctions?) for giving up HEU and agreeing to a multi year suspension of enrichment.
If the U.S. is stopping short of a permanent ban, and counteroffers are being made, that seems to suggest there is room for some kind of deal to be made.
