Diplomats tasked with crafting the framework of a permanent agreement on the status of Iran's nuclear program faced a long day and night of talks in Switzerland Wednesday, with no guaranteed of success.
Early Tuesday morning, top diplomats of four of the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany met alone and then with Iran's foreign minister to try to bridge the remaining gaps.
"Long day ahead," Deputy State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said in a tweet announcing the early Tuesday morning start of the foreign ministers' meeting with Iranian officials.
The so-called P5+1 nations -- the U.S., Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China -- have until midnight local time (6 p.m. Eastern Time) to hammer out an understanding that would serve as the jumping-off point to conclude a final deal by the end of June. The negotiation deadline has already been extended twice since an interim agreement was reached in November 2013, and it was not immediately clear what failure to meet this deadline would do for the future of the talks.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has been meeting with his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif in the Swiss town of Lausanne since Thursday in an intense effort to reach a political understanding on terms that would curb Iran's nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief.
Kerry and others at the table said the sides have made some progress, with Iran considering demands for further cuts to its uranium enrichment program but pushing back on how long it must limit technology it could use to make atomic arms. In addition to sticking points on research and development, differences remain on the timing and scope of sanctions removal, officials told the Associated Press.
Adding another layer of complexity to the difficult negotiations, The Wall Street Journal, citing Western officials, reported late Monday that there are signs that Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has not granted his negotiators the power to budge from their positions on certain critical issues.
In particular, the Journal reported that Khamenei has repeatedly insisted that U.N. sanctions be lifted immediately once any deal takes effect. By contrast, the U.S. and the other nations involved have proposed that sanctions would be lifted gradually and be tied to Iran living up to promises it has made in any agreement.
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Monday that Iran's expectations from the talks are "very ambitious" and not yet acceptable to his country or the other five negotiating: the U.S., Britain, China, France and Russia. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov left the talks on Monday and planned to return only if the prospects for a deal looked good.
Iran's deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told Iranian state television on Monday that the talks were not likely to reach any conclusion until "tomorrow or the day after tomorrow."
The Obama administration says any deal will stretch the time Iran needs to make a nuclear weapon from the present two to three months to at least a year. But critics object that it would keep Tehran's nuclear technology intact.
Officials in Lausanne said the sides were advancing on limits to aspects of Iran's program to enrich uranium, which can be used to make the core of a nuclear warhead.
Tehran has said it is willing to address concerns about its stockpiles of enriched uranium, although it has denied that will involve shipping it out of the country, as some Western officials have said. One official said on Monday that Iran might deal with the issue by diluting its stocks to a level that would not be weapons grade.
Uranium enrichment has been the chief concern in over more than a decade of international attempts to cap Iran's nuclear programs. But Western officials say the main obstacles to a deal are no longer enrichment-related but instead the type and length of restrictions on Tehran's research and development of advanced centrifuges and the pace of sanctions-lifting.
Over the past weeks, Iran has moved from demanding that it be allowed to keep nearly 10,000 centrifuges enriching uranium, to agreeing to 6,000. The officials said Tehran now may be ready to accept even fewer.
Tehran says it wants to enrich only for energy, science, industry and medicine. But many countries fear Iran could use the technology to make weapons-grade uranium.
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