LAUSANNE, Switzerland — Negotiators from the United States, Iran and five other nations pushed into the night on Monday to try to reach a preliminary political agreement on limiting Iran’s nuclear program.
But with a Tuesday deadline, it seemed clear that even if an accord were reached some of the toughest issues would remain unresolved until late June.
“We are working late into the night and obviously into tomorrow,” Secretary of State John Kerry said Monday night. “There is a little more light there today, but there are still some tricky issues. Everyone knows the meaning of tomorrow.”
The main points that the negotiators have been grappling with include the pace of lifting United Nations sanctions, restriction on the research and development of new types of centrifuges, the length of the agreement and even whether it would be detailed in a public document.
Yet another dispute was highlighted Sunday when Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, told Iranian and other international news organizations that Iran had no intention of disposing of its nuclear stockpile by shipping the fuel out of the country, as the United States has long preferred.
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“The export of stocks of enriched uranium is not in our program, and we do not intend sending them abroad,” Mr. Araqchi said.
A State Department spokeswoman confirmed that the stockpile question remained unresolved while insisting that Iran had not backtracked in recent days. “The bottom line is that we don’t have agreement with the Iranians on the stockpile issue,” the spokeswoman, Marie Harf, told reporters. “This is still one of the outstanding issues.”
The political accord, which American officials hope will be announced on Tuesday, is intended to define the main elements of a comprehensive agreement that it is to be completed by the end of June.
As the deadline has approached, Mr. Kerry and Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, have been joined by the chief diplomats from France, Britain, Germany, China, Russia and the European Union, though Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, left on Monday.
PHOTOGRAPHS
Stress and Hope in Tehran
As Iran and world powers including the United States try to reach a deal on nuclear controls in exchange for the lifting of sanctions, Iranians from all walks of life are watching and hoping for a new start.
The United States’ goal is to extend to a year the amount of time, known as the “breakout” time, that Iran would need to produce enough bomb-grade material for a single nuclear weapon. Achieving that objective depends on many factors, including how much nuclear fuel Iran has on hand and how fast it can produce new fuel.
The country has tens of thousands of pounds of uranium in various stages of enrichment, but over the past 18 months it has diluted the portion of its stockpile that was closest to being usable in a weapon.
American officials, however, are looking for a longer-term solution. The simplest approach would be to place much of the fuel out of Iran’s reach. Hopes were raised last year when diplomats believed that Iran would be willing to go along with that approach.
In November, there were reports that Iran had tentatively agreed to send the fuel to Russia for conversion into fuel rods that could power its only commercial power reactor. Ms. Harf insisted on Monday, after Mr Araqchi declared that Iran would never give up the fuel, that there never had been a tentative agreement and that shipping the fuel out of Iran was not a requirement for an agreement.
“You could have some other dispositions for it that get us where we need to be in terms of our bottom line,” she said.
On Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have said they expect a good part of Iran’s nuclear material to be removed from the country, the Iranian declaration triggered more unease.
“The shipping out of Iran’s uranium stockpile was to be the key administration win in this agreement,” Representative Ed Royce, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in an interview Monday. “It was presumed they were going to win on that point because they were giving in on every other point.
“Now,” he added, “it looks like that rationale is being tossed out the window.”
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Outside experts said the resolution of the issue was critical to the administration’s ability to make a convincing political case that the United States and its allies would have plenty of warning time if Iran made a dash for a bomb.
Robert Einhorn, a Brookings Institution scholar who worked for the first five years of the Obama administration on the Iran nuclear problem, said that for the last several months the United States and its negotiating partners “have been operating on the assumption that all but several hundred kilograms” of the country’s low-enriched uranium “would be shipped out.”
“Breakout calculations have based on that assumption,” he wrote in an email, using the term for how long it would take Iran to get a weapon’s worth of uranium.
In essence, Mr. Einhorn argued, the assumption that Iran would keep its uranium stockpile at a low level by exporting its fuel has enabled the United States to accept a trade-off in which Iran would be allowed to retain a high number of centrifuges without shortening the breakout time.
“So if Iran is withdrawing its tentative agreement to ship out the stocks, this would be a real setback,” he wrote. “It is not clear what measures would be needed to compensate in order to preserve the one-year breakout time.”
It appears that this issue, both a major political decision and a big technical hurdle, could be put off until June to enable the announcement of a broad but still vague “political understanding.”
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