RUSI Analysis, 25 Nov 2013 By Shashank Joshi, Research Fellow

The Geneva Agreement is an artistic, astute piece of diplomacy that puts Iran farther from nuclear weapons at within your budget. However the road to a last settlement is long and rocky.

(L to R) British Foreign Secretary William Hague, German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, US Secretary of State John Kerry,  24 November 2013 (EU photo)

After a decade of on-off nuclear diplomacy and just over one hundred days of the presidency of Iran’s Hassan Rouhani, a deal have been done between Iran and the E3+3 (the united kingdom, France, Germany plus the usa, Russia, and China; in brief, the Six) in Geneva. Although the deal appears to have come rapidly, it’s clear that the groundwork was laid by a US-Iran backchannel going back to at the very least Rouhani’s inauguration in August, and maybe further.

The deal itself is a modest achievement that doesn’t completely freeze Iran’s nuclear programme, defers the various most challenging issues to subsequent diplomacy to occur over the following six months, and depends upon artful language to bridge differences over the most important point of contention, Iran’s claimed ‘right to enrich’ uranium by itself soil. But it surely is an astute and creative piece of diplomacy, putting Iran objectively and verifiably further clear of any nuclear weapon, imposing curbs that transcend those who were anticipated by most observers, and the entire while leaving essentially the mostsome of the most punitive sanctions entirely in place.  

The Geneva Agreement

The deal (whose reported text is on the market here) has about a important aspects worth determining.

All but a freeze

First, it freezes crucial parts of Iran’s nuclear programme, while rolling back those elements which have been doing most to shorten Iran’s breakout time (the time it will take to supply fissile material for a single nuclear weapon).

Enrichment of uranium to twenty per cent, nine-tenths of ways to weapons-grade, is frozen (including by dismantling ‘technical connections’ between cascades) and stockpiles of uranium enriched to that higher level are to be converted into reactor fuel or diluted to lower levels.

Iran will continue enrichment as much as 5 per cent, but, importantly, has agreed that its stockpile of this lower enriched uranium can not grow over the six month period of the deal: it is going to convert the excess into oxide form, which makes it less readily usable for weapons use. Iran would possibly not install additional centrifuges, must leave a big proportion of installed centrifuges inactive, and can not even manufacture new centrifuges rather then to interchange damaged ones. That is  something it’s to be verified through ‘IAEA access to centrifuge assembly facilities’ and ‘centrifuge rotor component production and storage facilities’, measures that go way past Iran’s formal obligations to the Agency.

Iran’s heavy water reactor at Arak was never going to head operational in the course of the period of this interim deal anyway, however the agreement forbids Iran from transferring fuel or heavy water to the location – from testing or producing fuel, or installing ‘remaining components’ – easing the understandable concerns over how Iran may have used the deal to make progress towards activation of the reactor.

The implications of this are threefold: first, Iran’s breakout time has nearly doubled (from ‘no less than 1-1.6 months to at least 1.9-2.2 months’, consistent with ISIS’ David Albright); second, even the deal’s collapse will leave the West in a closer position than the pre-deal established order; third, the deal guards against Iran ‘buying time’ for 6 months after which, on the end of the negotiating period, installing enrichment capacity that it had built up and held in reserve. This increase in breakout time is very important, and it will be interpreted along side further provisions for ‘enhanced monitoring’ of Iran’s programme and daily access for inspectors (more than today). These upgraded monitoring rights are only a start – as portion of a last deal, Iran must ratify an extra Protocol, which supplies the IAEA wider powers – nonetheless it is a vital element, and one who, as Jeffrey Lewis explains, also modestly decreases the chance that Iran could conceal any secret nuclear facilities besides its declared, safeguarded ones.

In sum: not just wouldn’t it take Iran longer to provide the fissile material for a nuclear weapon, but its likelihood of having caught has also increased. The potential for undetected or unstoppable breakout has therefore diminished greatly. Counting on how the IAEA employed its new powers, the united states and Israel would have around two months after detecting any Iranian attempt at breakout to reply, greater than sufficient time for whatever response they deemed appropriate, including an army one (obviously, for those that believe that the united states would never use force against Iran, breakout times are irrelevant). Had a deal not been done, Iran’s breakout time would have shrunk over this same period to three weeks, long before sanctions compelled it to dismantle its programme.

Sanctions Relief

Second, the deal comes cheaply. Iran is being granted not up to $7 billion of sanctions relief interested by releasing frozen Iranian funds and relief on gold, petrochemical, and automobile sector sanctions. It is a small fraction of the fee being imposed monthly by the punishing oil and banking sanctions that stay firmly in place, including all EU-mandated sanctions. The deal also permits ‘Iran’s current customers to buy their current average amounts of crude oil’, which removes the specter of further export cuts and protects Iranian revenue. But Iran will still be forfeiting over thrice as much in foregone oil revenue because it will gain in relief.

There isn’t any logical explanation why these measures should subsequently weaken the remainder sanctions over the years, since the costs of noncompliance remain as high as ever. There isn’t any sanctions slippery slope. Moreover, if Iran is unwilling to comply with the further curbs and transparency measures of a last deal, new sanctions could greater than offset any gain it made within the six-month interim period.  

Compromise on enrichment

Third, the agreement is phenomenally carefully balanced at the issue of whether Iran is to be granted a ‘right to enrich’, something that Iranian officials had made a deal-breaker. US Secretary of State John Kerry insisted after the deal that ‘we don’t recognise a right to enrich’, whereas his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, declared the alternative.  This disagreement is a function of the language employed within the text:

This comprehensive solution would involve a mutually defined enrichment program with practical limits and transparency measures to make certain the peaceful nature of this system. This comprehensive solution would constitute an integrated whole where nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.

“The language on this agreement is an intelligent compromise”

Various UN Security Council resolutions have called on Iran to halt enrichment activity, and plenty of have taken the view that Iran should therefore only be granted sanctions relief upon perfect compliance – the so-called ‘zero enrichment’ position. P5+1 officials recognised that this was unrealistic, given the domestic prominence of the difficulty within Iran, but they were wary of agreeing that Iran had what it called an ‘inalienable’ right to enrichment, not least because this can set troubling precedents for civil nuclear cooperation and other cases of potential nuclear proliferation.

The language during this agreement is an intelligent compromise. America can argue that a ‘mutually defined’ programme is one who exists by consent, not by right, and that no such precedent is being sent; Iran can argue that any form of enrichment activity presupposes a right to enrichment, and that its right have been implicit recognised.

Moreover, the usa can claim that Iranian enrichment is just sanctioned under heavy curbs – without which the ‘integrated whole’ is incomplete and no enrichment programme could be ‘defined’ i.e., granted. Iran nonetheless will point to the clause specifying that ‘following successful implementation of the ultimate step of the great solution for its full duration, the Iranian nuclear program can be treated within the same manner as that of any non-nuclear weapon state party to the NPT’, suggesting that each one limits on enrichment capacity and suchlike will disappear if and when Iran can demonstrate its alleged nuclear weapons work not continues. Here is prone to become some extent of greater contention in final status discussion.

Loopholes

It is understandable that every side will interpret the agreement to fit its own interests, particularly when the problem has domestic political resonance. It was crucial for Iran’s negotiating team that they had been seen to successfully defend Iran’s nuclear rights, not least since the Supreme Leader had emphasised this issue. But this matter can become a source of anxiety if each side is seen to be exploiting loopholes.

When america concluded a handle North Korea last year, it assumed that missile tests were banned. But Pyongyang then conducted a satellite launch, which amounts to an identical thing; even though it were verbally agreed that this will be forbidden, it was never formalised. The diplomacy in Geneva was protracted and painstaking precisely to tie such loopholes up, but in an agreement of such complexity, handling highly complex nuclear issues, more points of friction may emerge through the years. Critics will soon complain that Iran’s missile programme, which was bound up with its alleged pre-2003 weapons programme, has gone unaddressed.

The agreement does specify that ‘a Joint Commission of E3/EU+3 [the Six powers] and Iran may be established to observe the implementation of the near-term measures and address issues that will arise’, however the key test of this commission could be its ability to solve any disputes before they rise, as they might quickly, to the political level. It will become more important than ever that the international community holds Iran to those commitments, on pain of further sanctions, but in addition that the united states upholds its own promises, particularly those concerning its own pause inside the imposition of recent sanctions.

Final status

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