Talks With Iran Fail to Produce a Nuclear Agreement

Marathon talks between major powers and Iran failed on Sunday to produce a deal to freeze its nuclear program, puncturing days of feverish anticipation and underscoring how hard it will be to forge a lasting solution to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Emerging from a last-ditch bargaining session that began Saturday but stretched past midnight, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, and Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said they had failed to overcome differences. They insisted they had made progress, however, and pledged to return to the table in 10 days to try again, albeit at a lower level.

“A lot of concrete progress has been made, but some differences remain,” Ms. Ashton said at a news conference early Sunday. She appeared alongside Mr. Zarif, who added, “I think it was natural that when we started dealing with the details, there would be differences.”

In the end, though, it was not only divisions between Iran and the major powers that prevented a deal, but fissures within the negotiating group. Earlier in the day, France objected strenuously that a proposed deal would do too little to curb Iran’s uranium enrichment or to stop the development of a nuclear reactor capable of producing plutonium.

“The Geneva meeting allowed us to advance, but we were not able to conclude because there are still some questions to be addressed,” the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, told reporters.

Neither Ms. Ashton nor Mr. Zarif criticized France, saying that it had played a constructive role. But the disappointment was palpable, and the decision to hold the next meeting at the level of political director, not foreign minister, suggested that the two sides were less confident of their ability to bridge the gaps in the next round.

For all that, Mr. Zarif tried to put a brave face on the three days of talks, saying that the atmosphere had been good, even if the parties disagreed on the details of a potential agreement.

“What I was looking for was the political determination, willingness and good faith in order to end this,” he said. “I think we’re all on the same wavelength and that’s important.”

Iranian officials had promoted the possibility of a deal for days, generating an expectant atmosphere that swelled when Secretary of State John Kerry cut short a tour of the Middle East on Friday to join the talks. He was joined by the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany and Russia and a vice foreign minister from China.

“There’s no question in my mind that we are closer now, as we leave Geneva, than when we came,” Mr. Kerry said. “It takes time to build confidence between countries that have really been at odds with each other for a long time now.”

Despite the insistence on progress, the failure to clinch an agreement raised questions about the future of the nuclear talks, given the fierce criticism that the mere prospect of a deal whipped up in Israel and among Republicans and some Democrats in Congress.

The announcement was a deflating end to a long day of diplomatic twists and turns, after Mr. Kerry huddled for hours with Mr. Zarif and Mr. Fabius to try to close gaps on issues like curbing Iran’s enrichment program and what to do about the heavy-water reactor Iran is building near the city of Arak, which will produce plutonium.

Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, said the plant could be dealt with in a future phase of the talks because it would take a year for it to be completed and even longer for it to produce plutonium that could be extracted for a bomb.

But Mr. Kerry said during his recent visit to Israel that the United States was asking Iran, as part of an interim accord, to agree to a “complete freeze over where they are today,” implying that Iran’s plutonium production program would be affected in some way as well. Under a compromise favored by some American officials, Iran might agree to refrain from operating the facility for six months, while continuing to work on the installation.

Once the reactor at Arak is operational, as early as next year, it might be very hard to disable it through a military strike without risking the dispersal of nuclear material. That risk might eliminate one of the West’s options for responding to Iran and reduce its leverage in the talks.

The Arak reactor has been a contentious negotiating point because it would give Iran another pathway to a bomb, using plutonium, rather than enriched uranium. Moreover, the Iranian explanations for why it is building Arak have left most Western nations and nuclear experts skeptical. The country has no need for the fuel for civilian uses now, and the reactor’s design renders it highly efficient for producing the makings of a nuclear weapon.

Iran, which has always contended its nuclear program was for peaceful purposes only, insists that the heavy-water reactor is just another path toward the same goal of energy production.

Israel has been vocal about not letting the new reactor get to the point where the fuel is inserted, after which military action against the reactor could create an environmental disaster. Israel has destroyed two reactors from the air in the past three decades, in Iraq in 1981 and in Syria in 2007. Both attacks took place before fuel had been put in the reactors.

French officials also noted a difference between the United States and Europe on the issue of sanctions relief, which Iran is seeking in return for a halt in nuclear activities. The most sweeping American sanctions on Iran’s oil and banking industries were passed by Congress, giving President Obama little flexibility to lift them.

That has led the Obama administration to focus on a narrower set of proposals involving Iranian cash that is frozen in overseas banks. Freeing that cash in installments, in return for specific steps by Iran, would not require the repeal of any congressional sanctions.

France and other European Union countries, however, face fewer political restrictions on ending their core sanctions, which means any decision to lift them could be more far-reaching. In addition, officials said that the measures would be harder to reinstate should the talks unravel or Iran renege on its pledges.

Those considerations left the Europeans more hesitant to consider easing sanctions than the United States was.

Still, European officials appeared to be balancing their wariness of Iran with a hopeful sense that these negotiations were fundamentally different from the fruitless sessions during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“All of the ministers who are here are conscious of that fact that some momentum has built up in these negotiations,” Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, told reporters on Saturday. “There is now a real concentration on these negotiations, so we have to do everything we can to seize the moment and seize the opportunity to reach a deal.”

But that momentum has disturbed other American allies, notably Israel, which continued on Saturday to inveigh against an interim deal. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has demanded that Iran close the Arak nuclear reactor and give up all enrichment of uranium, not just the 20 percent enrichment that is at issue in the negotiations.

Israel’s minister of strategic affairs, Yuval Steinitz, alluded to Scripture to condemn the potential deal. “In return for a mess of pottage,” he said, “Iran has achieved gains on both the sanctions and the nuclear fronts.”

Mr. Netanyahu earlier said the agreement could be a “deal of the century” for Iran. On Friday, Mr. Obama called Mr. Netanyahu to brief him on the talks and to assure him that the United States was still committed to preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear bomb.

“There are very strong feelings about the consequences of our choices for our allies,” Mr. Kerry said. “We have enormous respect for those concerns.”