In early November, Secretary of State Kerry said of the ongoing negotiations with Iran: "...we need to get the right deal; no deal is better than a bad deal." Unfortunately the November 24 "Joint Plan of Action" is a bad deal. This fact has been obscured by both the mischaracterization of the deal's benefits and the denial of the deal's great flaw.

President Obama has said that the Joint Plan of Action has "cut off Iran's most likely paths to a bomb." This is not true. Before the current nuclear deal Iran could produce the highly enriched uranium (HEU) for a nuclear weapon in just six weeks. By the end of the Joint Plan of Action's six-month period, Iran will be able to produce this material in just eight weeks. Iran wil still remain perilously close to a nuclear weapon.

The Joint Plan of Action allows Iran to continue to produce 3.5% enriched uranium which is the key starting material for any Iranian effort to produce highly enriched uranium for weapons. Iran's stockpile of this material will continue to grow during the course of this nuclear deal though several White House statements as well as Secretary Kerry have incorrectly claimed otherwise. The amount of HEU for nuclear weapons that Iran could produce from its enriched uranium stockpile in November 2013 was 67 kilograms. By July 20, 2014, six months after the Joint Plan of Action has taken effect, Iran's enriched uranium stockpile will have grown sufficiently so that Iran will then be able to produce 76 kilograms of HEU ― a 13% increase.

Under Secretary of State Wendy Sherman has made clear that it is Iran's stockpile of 3.5% enriched uranium in the form of uranium hexafluoride that is not supposed to grow, not its total stockpile of this material. Iran is supposed to convert the excess into an oxide form but it is unclear whether this will take place, as Iran has yet to get its conversion facility into operation. At any rate, Iran can easily convert this material back into hexafluoride once it begins to produce nuclear weapons using existing facilities that Iran already uses to produce uranium hexafluoride for its centrifuge enrichment process. This fact is well-known to U.S. technical experts but their input was apparently either not sought or heeded on this matter which is rather surprising given the technical nature of these negotiations.

The Joint Plan of Action does have some benefits and there are those who have argued that even limited benefits are better than no deal. But this view ignores the great flaw in the deal, that it permits Iran to retain centrifuge enrichment. This fact has been denied by Secretary of State Kerry but the Joint Plan of Action says in two separate places that the follow-on Comprehensive Solution would "involve a mutually-defined enrichment program...." Note that the text says "would," not "might" or "could." That the Comprehensive Solution will permit Iranian centrifuge enrichment was later confirmed by the Obama administration national security spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan, who said, "We are prepared to negotiate a strictly limited enrichment program."