[R-G] U.S. May Drop Key Condition for Talks With Iran

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/14/world/middleeast/14diplo.html>
April 14, 2009
U.S. May Drop Key Condition for Talks With Iran
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration and its European allies are
preparing proposals that would shift strategy toward Iran by dropping
a longstanding American insistence that Tehran rapidly shut down
nuclear facilities during the early phases of negotiations over its
atomic program, according to officials involved in the discussions.

The proposals, exchanged in confidential strategy sessions with
European allies, would press Tehran to open up its nuclear program
gradually to wide-ranging inspection. But the proposals would also
allow Iran to continue enriching uranium for some period during the
talks. That would be a sharp break from the approach taken by the Bush
administration, which had demanded that Iran halt its enrichment
activities, at least briefly to initiate negotiations.

The proposals under consideration would go somewhat beyond President
Obama’s promise, during the presidential campaign, to open
negotiations with Iran “without preconditions.” Officials involved in
the discussion said they were being fashioned to draw Iran into
nuclear talks that it had so far shunned.

A review of Iran policy that Mr. Obama ordered after taking office is
still under way, and aides say it is not clear how long he would be
willing to allow Iran to continue its fuel production, and at what
pace. But European officials said there was general agreement that
Iran would not accept the kind of immediate shutdown of its facilities
that the Bush administration had demanded.

“We have all agreed that is simply not going to work — experience
tells us the Iranians are not going to buy it,” said a senior European
official involved in the strategy sessions with the Obama
administration. “So we are going to start with some interim steps, to
build a little trust.”

Administration officials declined to discuss details of their
confidential deliberations, but said that any new American policy
would ultimately require Iran to cease enrichment, as demanded by
several United Nations Security Council resolutions.

“Our goal remains exactly what it has been in the U.N. resolutions:
suspension,” one senior administration official said. Another official
cautioned that “we are still at the brainstorming level” and said the
terms of an opening proposal to Iran were still being debated.

If the United States and its allies allow Iran to continue enriching
uranium for a number of months, or longer, the approach is bound to
meet objections, from both conservatives in the United States and from
the new Israeli government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

If Mr. Obama signed off on the new negotiating approach, the United
States and its European allies would use new negotiating sessions with
Iran to press for interim steps toward suspension of its nuclear
activities, starting with allowing international inspectors into sites
from which they have been barred for several years.

First among them is a large manufacturing site in downtown Tehran, a
former clock factory, where Iran is producing many of the
next-generation centrifuges that it is installing in the underground
plant at Natanz. “The facility is very large,” one United Nations
inspector said last week, “and we have not been inside since last
summer.”

Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the United Nations’
International Atomic Energy Agency, whose inspectors would be a
critical part of the strategy, said in an interview in his office in
Vienna last week that the Obama administration had not consulted him
on the details of a new strategy. But he was blistering about the
approach that the Bush administration had taken.

“It was a ridiculous approach,” he insisted. “They thought that if you
threatened enough and pounded the table and sent Cheney off to act
like Darth Vader the Iranians would just stop,” Dr. ElBaradei said,
shaking his head. “If the goal was to make sure that Iran would not
have the knowledge and the capability to manufacture nuclear fuel, we
had a policy that was a total failure.”

Now, he contended, Mr. Obama has little choice but to accept the
reality that Iran has “built 5,500 centrifuges,” nearly enough to make
two weapons’ worth of uranium each year. “You have to design an
approach that is sensitive to Iran’s pride,” said Dr. ElBaradei, who
has long argued in favor of allowing Iran to continue with a small,
face-saving capacity to enrich nuclear fuel, under strict inspection.

By contrast, in warning against a more flexible American approach, a
senior Israeli with access to the intelligence on Iran said during a
recent visit to Washington that Mr. Obama had only until the fall or
the end of the year to “completely end” the production of uranium in
Iran. The official made it clear that after that point, Israel might
revive its efforts to take out the Natanz plant by force.

A year ago, Israeli officials secretly came to the Bush administration
seeking the bunker-destroying bombs, refueling capability and
overflight rights over Iraq that it would need to execute such an
attack. President George W. Bush deflected the proposal. An Obama
administration official said “they have not been back with that
request,” but added that “we don’t think their threats are just
huffing and puffing.”

Israeli officials and some American intelligence officials say they
suspect that Iran has other hidden facilities that could be used to
enrich uranium, a suspicion explored in a 2007 National Intelligence
Estimate on Iran. But while that classified estimate referred to 10 or
15 suspect sites, officials say no solid evidence has emerged of
hidden activity.

“Frankly,” said one administration official, “what’s most valuable to
us now is having real freedom for the inspectors to pursue their
suspicions around the country.

“We know what’s happening at Natanz,” said the official, noting that
every few weeks inspectors are in and out of the plant. “It’s the rest
of the country we’re most worried about.”

Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at the Belfer Center at Harvard
University, said in a interview on Monday that the Obama
administration had some latitude in defining what constitutes
“suspension” of nuclear work.

One possibility, he said, was “what you call warm shutdown,” in which
the centrifuges keep spinning, but not producing new enriched uranium,
akin to leaving a car running, but in park.

That would allow both sides to claim victory: the Iranians could claim
they had resisted American efforts to shut down the program, while the
Americans and Europeans could declare that they had halted the
stockpiling of material that could be used to produce weapons.

“The hard part of these negotiations is how to convince everyone that
there are no covert sites,” Mr. Bunn said.