Kerry: ‘It May Be Iran Cannot Say Yes to the Type of Deal That Provides Assurances’
March 5, 2015 - 5:14 PM
By Terence P. Jeffrey
(CNSNews.com) - At a joint press briefing in Riyadh today with Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, Secretary of State John Kerry said it might turn out that Iran will not agree to a deal on its nuclear program that gives other nations the “assurances” they need.
“It may be that Iran cannot say yes to the type of deal that provides assurances that the international community requires,” said Kerry.
The secretary of state had travelled to Saudi Arabia from Switzerland where he had been negotiating with the Iranians.
“Obviously, the outcome of these negotiations will be of major consequence to the United States, yes, but really to the entire world and particularly to this region, and we understand that,” said Kerry. “With that fact comes a responsibility to all of us in the P5+1 to get it right.”
The P5+1, which is attempting to negotiate a deal to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon, includes the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, China and Russia.
“Preventing a nuclear-armed Iran will, as Prince Saud just said, address many of the concerns of the region,” said Kerry. “It will alleviate tension and remove barriers to regional security. It will reduce the pressure for a regional nuclear arms race, and it will increase the strength of the international nonproliferation regime. It will also vastly improve the prospects for peace both here and elsewhere.
“So a large part of why I wanted to come to Riyadh today is to update our Gulf partners on exactly where the negotiations stand, on what our standards are, on what we are looking to achieve, and what we have done since the talks first started,” said Kerry.
“And let me underscore,” he said, “we are not seeking a grand bargain. Nothing will be different the day after this agreement, if we were to reach one, with respect to all the other issues that challenge us in this region, except that we will have taken steps to guarantee that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. And that is a critical component of security for the region and for the world.
“We are seeking to show that Iran’s program is exclusively peaceful and that we can block all of the pathways necessary to acquire the fissile material for a nuclear weapon and then to be able to move towards the production of that weapon,” said Kerry.
“To date, we have made progress, but there do remain serious gaps, and those need to be resolved,” he said. “We still don’t know whether we’ll get there. I said that in Switzerland; I say it again today.
“It may be that Iran cannot say yes to the type of deal that provides assurances that the international community requires,” Kerry said. “But we plan to return to the talks on the 15th of March, and we expect soon thereafter to know whether Iran will, in fact, be able to make the tough decisions that are required to get where we need to be.”
As senior administration officials explained at a background briefing sponsored by the White House during a G-20 summit in Pittsburgh in September 2009, the Iranians have been caught twice before secretly building facilities for enriching uranium.
At that 2009 briefing a senior administration official explained why the second facility, near the Iranian city of Qom, seemed more suited to helping Iran develop a nuclear weapon than develop peaceful uses of nuclear power.
“Our information is that the facility is designed to hold about 3,000 centrifuge machines,” the senior administration official said. “Now, that's not a large enough number to make any sense from a commercial standpoint. It cannot produce a significant quantity of low-enriched uranium. But if you want to use the facility in order to produce a small amount of weapons-grade uranium, enough for a bomb or two a year, it's the right size. And our information is that the Iranians began this facility with the intent that it be secret, and therefore giving them an option of producing weapons-grade uranium without the international community knowing about it.”
On Monday, International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Yukiya Amano addressed the IAEA's Board of Governors about Iran's nuclear program. He said the agency was not able to say if all Iran's nuclear materials were being used for peaceful purposes.
“Concerning safeguards implementation in Iran, the Agency continues to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material declared by Iran under its Safeguards Agreement," Amano said in his written statement. "However, the Agency is not in a position to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.”
The italics were in Amano's original statment.
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