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No amount of spinning can change what happened within 5+1 in Geneva from 6PM Thursday to 545 PM Saturday.But it can further erode confidence
— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) November 11, 2013
Mr.Secretary, was it Iran that gutted over half of US draft Thursday night? and publicly commented against it Friday morning?
No, it was France.
Zarif was contradicting Secretary of State Kerry, who after the talks ended said that the P5+1, including the United States and France, were in agreement and that it was Iran who scuttled the negotiations.
Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, doesn’t agree, and his account tallies with Zarif’s. Reports the Associated Press:
Russia’s foreign minister says Iran had accepted a U.S.-draft proposal on a nuclear deal, but last-minute amendments blocked an accord last week in Geneva. Sergey Lavrov’s account fits with comments from Iran and world powers.
charles1952
reply to post by OpinionatedB
Dear OpionatedB,
I actually applauded the French on this move. From what I've heard, the West would end some of the sanctions on Iran, in exchange Iran would promise to stop their weapons program, but not allow inspections on demand at their two most controversial sites.
France said, this is insanely one-sided and we'll have nothing to do with it.
If you have additional information I'd be glad to hear of it. It's really hard to get the true picture.
With respect,
Charles1952
HARI SREENIVASAN: In an op-ed the Iranian president wrote in the Washington Post, they said their pursuit of nuclear is for energy interests only, does the country have an infrastructure to take this in?
DAVID ALBRIGHT: Certainly Iran has a legitimate reason to pursue nuclear power and they bought a nuclear power reactor from Russia in order to produce electricity for civilian use. The question is, why do they need all these other facilities that enrich uranium, a reactor that really looks more designed to make plutonium than to do anything else- and plutonium again is a nuclear explosive material that can be used to make the bomb. So there's a lot of questions, there’s also a lot of evidence that Iran did seek nuclear weapons.
The U.S. intelligence community, judged with high confidence that prior to 2004, Iran had a nuclear weapons program. That assessment is shared by our closest allies Britain, France and Germany and also Israel, the International Atomic Energy Agency has additional evidence suggesting that Iran's work on nuclear weapons continued after 2003, so, there's evidence that Iran has worked a great deal on nuclear weapons and that – when it says it never did, it’s simply not telling the truth. And so there is a lot of suspicion that they will try to do so again in the future.