VIENNA: US Secretary of State John Kerry warned on Monday it was too soon to tell if a nuclear deal with Iran is possible as he awaited the return of Iran’s foreign minister from consultations in Tehran.

“We’re just working and it’s too early to make any judgements,” Kerry told reporters in Vienna following a weekend of intense talks with counterparts from five other major powers and Iran.

He was meeting with Yukiya Amano, the head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which will have a crucial role in verifying Iran’s claims that its nuclear programme is purely peaceful and also to make sure it does not cheat in the future.

More contentiously, the IAEA wants to investigate claims that before 2003 and possibly since Iran carried out nuclear weapons development work — something denied by Iran — and to be able to probe any such claims in the future.

A senior US administration official stressed that global powers were not asking for access to every military site.

“The entry point isn’t we must be able to get into every military site, because the United States of America wouldn’t allow anybody to get into every military site, so that’s not appropriate,” the official told reporters.

“There are conventional purposes, and there are secrets that any country has that they are not willing to share”.

But the official said global powers had proposed a way forward as part of parameters agreed in Lausanne on April 2 “that we believe will ensure that the IAEA has the access it needs”. In a possible sign of progress, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said he would arrive in Vienna on Tuesday, coinciding with the expected return of his Iranian opposite number Mohammad Javad Zarif, who had flown home Sunday night for consultations.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, speaking in New York, said he would be back in the Austrian capital this week. It was unclear when his British, German or Chinese counterparts might follow suit.

Read: Framework for final deal reached at Iran nuclear talks

In April, Iran and the P5+1 group — the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany — agreed on the main outlines of a deal hoping to end a 13-year standoff over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Under the framework, Iran will dramatically scale down its atomic activities in order to make any drive to make a weapon — an ambition it denies having — all but impossible.

This includes slashing the number of centrifuges enriching uranium, which can be used for nuclear fuel but also in a bomb, reducing its uranium stockpile and modifying a planned reactor at Arak.

Published in Dawn, June 30th, 2015

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