China's foreign minister said there was "significant progress in core issues" in Iran talks to reach an outline accord reining in Tehran's nuclear programme, despite six world powers and Iran missing a deadline to reach an agreement, the foreign ministry said on Wednesday.
Wang Yi said late on Tuesday that the positions of all parties involved in Iran talks "have become closer" and called on all sides to "take into account all parties' core interests", according to a statement on the foreign ministry's website.
Six world powers and Iran missed a Tuesday deadline, failing to agree on crucial details such as the lifting of UN sanctions, and extended talks into an extra day.
The main points the negotiators have been grappling with include the pace of lifting the sanctions, restriction on the research and development of new types of centrifuges, the length of the agreement and even whether it would be detailed in a public document.
Aanother dispute was highlighted on Sunday when Iran's deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, told Iranian and other international news organisations that Iran had no intention of disposing of its nuclear stockpile by shipping the fuel out of the country, as the US has long preferred.
“The export of stocks of enriched uranium is not in our program, and we do not intend sending them abroad,” Mr Araqchi said.
A State Department spokeswoman confirmed that the stockpile question remained unresolved while insisting that Iran had not backtracked in recent days.
“The bottom line is that we don’t have agreement with the Iranians on the stockpile issue,” the spokeswoman, Marie Harf, told reporters. “This is still one of the outstanding issues.”
The political accord, which US officials had hoped would be announced on Tuesday, is intended to define the main elements of a comprehensive agreement that it is to be completed by the end of June.
As the deadline has approached, Mr Kerry and Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran's foreign minister, have been joined by the chief diplomats from France, Britain, Germany, China, Russia and the European Union.
The United States’ goal is to extend to a year the amount of time, known as the “breakout” time, that Iran would need to produce enough bomb-grade material for a single nuclear weapon. Achieving that objective depends on many factors, including how much nuclear fuel Iran has on hand and how fast it can produce new fuel.
The country has tens of thousands of pounds of uranium in various stages of enrichment, but over the past 18 months it has diluted the portion of its stockpile that was closest to being usable in a weapon.
US officials, however, are looking for a longer-term solution. The simplest approach would be to place much of the fuel out of Iran’s reach. Hopes were raised last year when diplomats believed that Iran would be willing to go along with that approach.
In November, there were reports that Iran had tentatively agreed to send the fuel to Russia for conversion into fuel rods that could power its only commercial power reactor. Ms Harf insisted on Monday, after Mr Araqchi declared that Iran would never give up the fuel, that there never had been a tentative agreement and that shipping the fuel out of Iran was not a requirement for an agreement.
“You could have some other dispositions for it that get us where we need to be in terms of our bottom line,” she said.
Reuters/The New York Times