90% of ‘technical issues’ solved: Iran

90% of ‘technical issues’ solved: Iran
Updated 24 March 2015
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90% of ‘technical issues’ solved: Iran

90% of ‘technical issues’ solved: Iran

LAUSANNE: Uncertainty reigned at crunch US-Iran nuclear talks Tuesday as US officials warned that key differences remained but Tehran said that almost all technical issues were resolved ahead of a March 31 deadline for the outlines of a deal.
“We have agreed on 90% of the technical issues,” Iran’s nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi was quoted by state television as saying from the marathon negotiations inside a plush hotel in the Swiss lakeside city of Lausanne.
“In most of the issues we have come to mutual agreements — we have differences only in one major issue which we will try to solve in this evening’s meeting” between Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and US Secretary of State John Kerry, Salehi said.
The deal being sought by Kerry, Zarif and other negotiators including Salehi and US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz will, they hope, convince the world that Iran will not develop nuclear weapons under the guise of its civilian program.
The accord, due to be finalized by July, would involve Iran, which denies wanting the bomb, agreeing to scale down its nuclear activities to within strict limits in return for relief from sanctions suffocating its economy.
If they manage it and the accord holds, both sides hope it will end a 12-year standoff and potentially help normalize Iran’s international relations at a particularly volatile time in the Middle East.
But it is highly complex, with both sides haggling over the adjustments to Iran’s facilities needed to extend the “breakout” time to at least a year that Tehran would — in theory — need to process a bomb’s worth of nuclear material.
At the same time both sides need to agree a timetable of relief from the spider’s web of UN, US and EU sanctions imposed in recent years, tied to certain “milestones” and staggered over whatever duration the accord will have.
As a result US negotiators in the marathon talks were more downbeat, with one senior administration official — involved in the technical side of the negotiations — saying Tuesday there was still “a ways to go.”