Iran and six world powers made little progress in overcoming significant disagreements in the most recent round of nuclear talks, including on uranium enrichment, Iranian and Western diplomats close to the negotiations said yesterday.
Officials from Iran and the six countries had cautioned ahead of the talks in New York that a breakthrough was unlikely to end sanctions on Tehran, although they had hoped substantial progress could be made in narrowing disagreements.
A senior State Department official said gaps “are still serious” with just eight weeks to go before a November 24 deadline.
“We do not have an understanding on all major issues, we have some understandings that are helpful to move this process forward and we have an enormous number of details still to work through,” the official told reporters.
“We still have some very, very difficult understandings yet to reach, and everyone has to make difficult decisions and we continue to look to Iran to make some of the ones necessary for getting to a comprehensive agreement,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. Another diplomat said Iran and the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China would likely meet again in the coming weeks, but no date and venue have been set.
Iran President Hassan Rouhani said at a news conference in New York that the “progress we have witnessed in recent days has been extremely slow.”
“We must look forward to the future and make the courageous decisions vis-a-vis this problem,” he said, adding that any deal without lifting all sanctions against Tehran was “unacceptable.”
US Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters that an interim deal approved in Geneva last November under which Iran had halted higher-level enrichment in exchange for limited sanctions relief “has made the world safer”.
On a long-term deal, Kerry said “it remains our fervent hope that Iran” and the six powers “can in the next weeks come to an agreement that would benefit the world.”
Iran and the six hope that a resolution of the more-than-decade-long nuclear standoff with Iran will reduce regional tensions and remove the risk of another war in the Middle East.