Iranians celebrated in the streets after negotiators reached a framework for a nuclear accord and US President Barack Obama hailed an “historic understanding” but senior global diplomats cautioned that hard work lies ahead to strike a final deal.
The tentative agreement, struck on Thursday after eight days of talks in Switzerland, clears the way for a settlement to allay Western fears that Iran could build an atomic bomb, with economic sanctions on Tehran being lifted in return.
It marks the most significant step towards rapprochement between Washington and Tehran since the 1979 Iranian revolution and could bring an end to decades of Iran’s international isolation.
But the deal still requires experts to work out difficult details before a self-imposed June deadline and diplomats said it could collapse at any time before then.
“We are not completely at the end of the road and the end of the road should be in June,” said French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius. “Nothing is signed until everything is signed, but things are going in the right direction.”
Deal requires experts to work out difficult details
Under Thursday’s terms, Iran would cut back its stockpiles of enriched uranium that could be used to make a bomb and dismantle most of the centrifuges it could use to make more. Intensive international inspections would prevent it from violating the terms in secret. Washington said the settlement would extend the “breakout time” needed for Iran to make a bomb to a full year, from two to three months from now.
For Iran, it would eventually lead to the end of sanctions that have cut the oil exports that underpin its economy by more than half over the past three years.
Still, decades of hostility remain between countries that have referred to each other as “the Great Satan” and part of the “axis of evil”. Obama and Iranian President Hasan Rouhani, who both took risks to open the dialogue, will each have to sell the deal to sceptical conservatives at home.
US Republicans have demanded that the Congress they control be given the right to review the deal.
Celebrations erupted in the Iranian capital after the deal was reached. Cars in Tehran honked horns as passengers clapped.
Yesterday, conservative clerics signalled their support, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, whose authority exceeds that of the elected president, Rouhani. In the weekly sermon at Tehran University, Ayatollah Mohammad Emami-Kashani, a 78-year-old hardline cleric, said Khamenei backed the negotiating team. Emami-Kashani praised the negotiators as “firm, wise and calm” and congratulated Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Still, he spoke from behind a podium with a saying from the leader of Iran’s revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which read: “We will put America beneath our feet”.
Iran would uphold its commitments only if the West did, he said: “If you break a promise, then Iran will break its promise.” Obama described the agreement as an “historic understanding with Iran”. He compared it with nuclear arms control deals struck by his predecessors – including Republicans – with the Soviet Union that “made our world safer” during the Cold War.