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Iran announced on Thursday that it had delivered its response on a proposed nuclear deal to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. It appeared to signal that its answer - not yet made public - is to accept the framework of the agreement to reprocess some of its enriched uranium abroad to create fuel for a medical research reactor but at the same time demand important changes to the deal. As Tehran has kept the world waiting over the past week, conventional wisdom has held that Iran is playing for time, testing the limits of international political resolve, and hamstrung...
...higher grade and converted into fuel plates in France, after which it would be shipped back to Iran to power the Tehran medical research reactor. Western governments, which fear that Iran has already stockpiled enough enriched uranium to be reprocessed into a single bomb, like that the deal would remove most of Tehran's stockpile and return it in a state difficult for Iran to weaponize. Though there are no signs that Iran is working on turning its uranium into a bomb, the West wants the material moved out of Iran in a single shipment...
...sees things differently. It has no intention of relinquishing its uranium-enrichment program, which it insists is for the peaceful purpose of a civilian energy program and is its right as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). And what it likes most about the Vienna deal is that it can be read as tacit acceptance of Iranian enrichment; the stockpile at the heart of the deal, after all, was enriched in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions...
Israel, which has threatened military action if Iran's nuclear program is not stopped, has been increasingly critical of the Vienna deal for the very reasons that Tehran welcomes it. "[The agreement] means that [the U.S., Russia and France] recognize that Iran is enriching uranium and that helps [Iran] with their argument that they are enriching uranium for peaceful purposes," Defense Minister Ehud Barak said on Thursday. "It is important to insist on an end to enrichment in Iran...
...hard to see how the competing underlying objectives influence both sides' approach to the deal. Having tried unsuccessfully to sideline France from the deal, Iranian officials have talked of possibly extending the range of suppliers of enriched uranium to include China - which is fast emerging as Iran's most significant economic partner and is not aligned with the more dire Western reading of Iran's intentions. And Iran will likely insist that it send its uranium to Russia in smaller installments and over a longer time frame, to test the bona fides of its partners without surrendering most...