Iran's nuclear program: talk of international consortium

Three decades of hostility between the US and Iran have tangled politics and deep mistrust with technical issues about Iran's rights and obligations as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). A US-European package of incentives requires total suspension of enrichment as a pre-condition to even begin negotiation – a stance many argue is untenable.

"Right now, Iran is holding the cards," says Mr. Levi, author of the recently published On Nuclear Terrorism. "The odds of us getting zero enrichment without a military strike are low…. If we can't muster much additional pressure, I don't see any solution that does not involve limited enrichment. And if we are going to accept [that], we want to put as many constraints on it as we can."

Experts say that to be effective, any joint program would depend on – among other restrictions – Iran accepting the additional protocol of the NPT, which enables intrusive, short-notice inspections.

Iran was praised in the February report by the UN's nuclear watchdog agency for taking such open steps to resolve several outstanding issues, but says it will not accept the protocol wholesale until its case is removed from the Security Council agenda.

"Now Iran knows the technique and technologies. Iran has the base, and when a country has a base you can't change everything – you must deal with it," says Sadegh Kharazi, Iran's former ambassador to Paris.

"Now the leadership of Iran is ready to make a decision – a comprehensive decision," he says, adding that Iran demonstrated seriousness by resolving six longstanding issues identified with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) last year. Another window may have opened since the recent US National Intelligence Estimate found that Iran had halted a nuclear weapons program in 2003.

"Why aren't the Americans ready to deal with Iran? Why every time is their policy to demolish Iran, to embargo and sanction Iran?" asks Kharazi. "This policy is dead. Now is the time of negotiation, of dealing and dialogue."

That is the conclusion of a proposal published in late February in The New York Review of Books, in which three US diplomats and policymakers – among them, former undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering – argue that multilateral enrichment on Iranian soil "provides better protection against proliferation than the status quo" because the "enhanced transparency … and the constant presence in Iran of foreign monitors" would make secret diversion more difficult.

Washington's insistence on zero enrichment on Iranian soil "grows less credible with every newly constructed Iranian centrifuge," the authors write. A face- saving mechanism for both sides could be joint enrichment, they say, because the US could reduce proliferation risk and "avoid the prospect of Iran successfully defying US-led sanctions and building a bomb." Iran "avoids becoming an international pariah and does not have to wave the flag of surrender to do so."

The article's call for direct talks and exploring a compromise was supported by letters from Senators Dianne Feinstein (D) of California and Chuck Hagel (R) of Nebraska, who said the US "cannot afford any longer to refuse to consider the strategic choice of direct talks with Iran."

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