

November 23, 2013|Fredrik Dahl | Reuters


Iranian officials made clear on the third day of talks in Geneva on Friday that the Islamic state's "right" to enrich uranium must be part of any interim deal aimed at curbing its atomic activity in exchange for some sanctions relief.



Uranium can be used to fuel nuclear power plants - Iran's stated purpose for its atomic energy drive - but can also provide the fissile core of an atomic bomb if processed much further, which the West fears may be Tehran's ultimate aim.


"Iran's enrichment is non-negotiable and there is no solution without respecting Iran's right to enrichment," Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, Tehran's chief negotiator, said this week.


"Matters of legal theory aside, the right to enrichment has become a shorthand for the real central issue in the negotiations - whether Iran will be allowed to maintain a nuclear weapons option as part of a nuclear program under international safeguards," Gary Samore, until recently the top nuclear proliferation expert on U.S. President Barack Obama's national security staff, wrote in a Foreign Affairs article.



While recognizing every country's right to develop peaceful nuclear energy, it does not directly mention enrichment.

The NPT's opening paragraphs ban non-nuclear weapon states from developing such arms, but adds in Article Four: "Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination."





Article Four "is silent on the issue. It neither confers a right nor denies a right. So we don't believe it is inherently there", the senior Obama administration official said.

Samore said the United States and its allies have been making an additional argument: that whatever Iran's rights under the NPT might be, they have been superseded by a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions in the last seven years demanding that Iran suspend its enrichment activities.




But Western powers seem unlikely to want to officially concede on this point, and potentially allow Iran to pursue some enrichment, until they reach a final accord that offers sufficient guarantees that Iran's nuclear work is peaceful.


"I think it is understood that Iran will have some kind of enrichment program at the end of the day," said proliferation expert Mark Hibbs of the Carnegie Endowment think tank.