• pub­lished: 01 Apr 2015
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LAU­SANNE, Switzer­land — With a ne­go­ti­at­ing dead­line just two days away, Ira­ni­an of­fi­cials on Sun­day backed away from a crit­i­cal el­e­ment of a pro­posed nu­cle­ar agree­ment, say­ing they are no longer will­ing to ship their atom­ic fuel out of the coun­try. For months, ten­ta­tive­ly agreed that it would send a large por­tion of its stock­pile of ura­ni­um to Rus­sia, where it would not be ac­ces­si­ble for use in any fu­ture weapons pro­gram. But on Sun­day Iran’s deputy for­eign min­is­ter made a sur­prise com­ment to Ira­ni­an re­porters, rul­ing out an agree­ment that in­volved giv­ing up a stock­pile that Iran has spent years and bil­lions of dol­lars to amass. “The ex­port of stocks of en­riched ura­ni­um is not in our pro­gram, and we do not in­tend send­ing them abroad,” the of­fi­cial, Abbas Araqchi, told the Ira­ni­an media, ac­cord­ing to Agence France-Presse. “There is no ques­tion of send­ing the stocks abroad. ” But the de­vel­op­ment could give op­po­nents an­oth­er rea­son to ob­ject, adding it to a list of what they call con­ces­sions made by an ad­min­is­tra­tion in search of an agree­ment. If Iran ever bars the in­spec­tors from the coun­try, as North Korea did a dozen years ago, the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty would have no as­sur­ance about the fate of the fuel. Nor has Iran an­swered long­stand­ing ques­tions about its sus­pect­ed nu­cle­ar de­sign and test­ing of com­po­nents that could be used to det­o­nate a war­head. Ray Takeyh, a se­nior fel­low at the Coun­cil on For­eign Re­la­tions who has been crit­i­cal of the emerg­ing ac­cord, said the de­vel­op­ment raised se­ri­ous ques­tions about a pos­si­ble deal. “The vi­a­bil­i­ty of this agree­ment as a re­li­able arms con­trol ac­cord is di­min­ished by this,” Mr. Takeyh said. “One of the core ad­min­is­tra­tion ar­gu­ments has been that the ura­ni­um would be shipped abroad as a con­fi­dence build­ing mea­sure. ”On the as­sump­tion that Iran’s ura­ni­um stock­pile would be small, the Unit­ed States and its ne­go­ti­at­ing part­ners had been mov­ing to­ward an agree­ment that would allow Iran to re­tain rough­ly 6,000 cen­trifuges in op­er­a­tion. It is not clear how much that might change if the fuel, even in di­lut­ed form, re­mains in the coun­try. If the fuel had been shipped to , the plan called for Moscow to con­vert it into spe­cial­ized fuel rods for the Bushehr nu­cle­ar power plant, Iran’s only com­mer­cial re­ac­tor. Once it was con­vert­ed into fuel rods, it would have been ex­treme­ly dif­fi­cult for Iran to use the ma­te­ri­al to make a nu­cle­ar weapon. “We are not there yet,” said one West­ern of­fi­cial who, like oth­ers in this ar­ti­cle, de­clined to be iden­ti­fied be­cause he was dis­cussing diplo­mat­ic de­lib­er­a­tions. “There are lots of pieces float­ing around. ”Yet even if a deal was reached by late Tues­day, Amer­i­can ne­go­tia­tors made clear that this was just an in­ter­im step, and that any final agree­ment would re­quire months of ne­go­ti­a­tions over what were once called “tech­ni­cal agree­ments” but are now clear­ly the source of con­tin­u­ing dis­agree­ment. That cal­cu­la­tion over “break­out time” is so com­plex that ex­perts from Britain, France, Ger­many and Is­rael all have some­what slight­ly dif­fer­ent cal­cu­la­tions than those of ex­perts from the Unit­ed States. The de­bate over break­out time in­ten­si­fied when Olli Heinonen, who ran in­spec­tions for the I. A. E. A. be­fore mov­ing to Har­vard sev­er­al years ago, pub­lished a paper on Sat­ur­day con­clud­ing that, based on leaked es­ti­mates that Iran would op­er­ate rough­ly 6,500 cen­trifuges, “a break­out time of be­tween seven and eight months would still be pos­si­ble. ”A se­nior Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion of­fi­cial here said that while he did not dis­pute Mr. Heinonen’s fig­ures, the for­mer in­spec­tor had con­duct­ed a text­book cal­cu­la­tion rather than ex­am­in­ing the re­al-life con­di­tions at Iran’s fa­cil­i­ties. Like other coun­tries, Iran loses some of its nu­cle­ar ma­te­ri­al every time it is changed from a gas to a solid, and its ma­chin­ery, the ev­i­dence shows, does not run at per­fect ef­fi­cien­cy. The of­fi­cial said that the Unit­ed States had cre­at­ed a mea­sure based on what Amer­i­can of­fi­cials have called t