Interviews

Interviews

A compromise proposal for nuclear talks with Iran

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As American and Iranian officials meet in Geneva to try to find a way through the impasse holding up a comprehensive multilateral deal onIran‘s nuclear programme, a group of Princeton University academics have sent them a proposed road-map on how to get around the blockage.

The Princeton report, published on the Arms Control Today website, focuses on the core issue that has proved most problematic in the four months of talks so far – Iran’s future capacity for enriching uranium. This has hitherto been such a gap to bridge because Iran and the West come at it from entirely different perspectives.

The Princeton compromise is a two-stage approach, allowing a very limited enrichment capacity for the existing research reactor in Tehran in the short term, but with the flexibility to expand that capacity to keep pace with the construction of future nuclear power stations in the long term. The existing contract for Russian nuclear fuel rods for Bushehr expires in 2021. If Tehran decides it wants to use it own rods after that, then its enrichment capacity would be stepped up as that deadline approaches, but not before 2019.

In the intervening five years, Iran would focus on modernising its enrichment plant, replacing the now ancient and inefficient IR-1 centrifuges, based on half-century old technology, with a new generation of IR-2m centrifuges, with about five times the capacity. As the new machines were installed in this first phase, total capacity would remain the same. Even more advanced centrifuges would be developed with an eye to the future.

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“A compromise proposal for nuclear talks with Iran,” Interview with Hossein Mousavian, Julian Borger, The Guardian, June 9, 2014.

Interviews

Princeton experts propose possible solution on Iran centrifuges

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As American and Iranian officials meet June 9 in Geneva, a former spokesman for Iran’s nuclear negotiators, Seyyed Hossein Mousavian, and several physicists at Princeton are proposing a possible solution to the dispute over how many centrifuges Iran can retain under a long-term nuclear agreement.

Their draft proposal, prepared for publication by the magazine Arms Control Today and made available to Al-Monitor, would permit Iran to transition from the rudimentary machines it currently employs to enrich uranium to more-advanced centrifuges over the course of five years. This would reduce the numbers of centrifuges Iran would require to meet the needs of even an expanded civilian reactor program, but it still raises concerns about Iran’s ability to “break out” and produce fuel for nuclear weapons.

To deal with these concerns, the authors — Mousavian, Alexander Glaser, Zia Mian and Frank von Hippel — suggest that Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany, the P5+1 nations, explore creating a multilateral uranium enrichment facility that could supply Iran and other countries in the region with nuclear fuel. Such an arrangement, they say, “could provide a long-term solution to the proliferation concerns raised by national enrichment plants in the Middle East and elsewhere.”

With the interim agreement due to expire July 20, there is mounting pressure on all sides to resolve disputes over the scope of Iran’s nuclear program and sanctions relief. If no deal is reached, the interim agreement can be renewed for six months, but political and bureaucratic realities argue for resolution by this fall, when the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, and US Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns are due to retire and Americans will vote in congressional elections that could flip control of the Senate to the Republicans. Without a deal, pressure is sure to increase in the US Congress for more sanctions legislation against Iran, which could embolden Iranian hard-liners.

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“Princeton experts propose possible solution on Iran centrifuges,” Interview with Hossein Mousavian, Barbara Slavin, Al-Monitor, June 9, 2014.

Interviews

Book Review: US-Iran Misperceptions: A Dialogue

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Written by several policy experts from the US and Iran, this book is a must read by anyone seeking to grasp the inventory of the past and present issues between the two countries and the possibilities that exist to move beyond the long-standing stalemate toward a new chapter in relations between Tehran and Washington.  The authors do not necessarily agree with each other in their assessments of the sources of enduring hostility between US and Iran and or their extent of optimism regarding any breakthrough in the stalemated relations, yet their narratives commonly hammer the need to move these relations forward by, first and foremost, learning from the past history and avoiding the “highly counterproductive” misperceptions, such as those that reinforce Manichean enemy images of the other side.

With respect to the Iranian leader’s perception of US, the contribution by Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian diplomat sheds light on Ayatollah Khamenei’s nuanced political ideology that evinces rational thinking and valid suspicions of American intentions toward Iran, intermixed with his willingness to pursue the diplomatic track with Washington within the framework of Iran’s national interests.  It is important to add to Mousavian’s insight, however, the importance of “value-rationality” that needs to be distinguished from “practical rationality,” following a well-known Weberian and Habermasian tradition, so that the kernel of Iran’s antipathy to nuclear weapons on both practical and moral and ethical grounds can be better understood.

Editors: Abbas Maleki & John Tirman
Paperback: 176 pages
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic (February 13, 2014)
ISBN-10: 1623569362
ISBN-13: 978-1623569365
“Book Review: US-Iran Misperceptions: A Dialogue,” Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, American Iranian Council, May 27, 2014.
Interviews

Book by former Iran official looks at Quds Force leader, Saudi king

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For the last few years, Al-Monitor’s Seyed Hossein Mousavian has been among the most prolific Iranian writers in the United States promoting US-Iran reconciliation and trying to explain his complicated and often maligned country to American audiences.

In a new book, “Iran and the United States: An Insider’s View on the Failed Past and the Road to Peace,” Mousavian continues this mission while revealing new details of fruitless overtures by Iranian leaders to ease hostilities over the past two decades.

For students of this bitter history, the book — co-authored by Shahir ShahidSaless, a political analyst and freelance journalist who, like Mousavian, is also an Al-Monitor contributor — is most interesting for its vignettes and quotes from senior Iranian officials at crucial moments in US-Iran relations.

While “The road to peace between Iran and the US is truly a bumpy one,” détente, if not reconciliation, is not impossible, he writes. “I am confident that the dominant viewpoint inside [the system], including that of the supreme leader, is to end the hostilities with the US based on mutual respect, noninterference and mutual interest.”

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“Book by former Iran official looks at Quds Force leader, Saudi king,” Interview with Hossein Mousavian, Barbara Slavin, Al-Monitor, May 19, 2014.