Weapon Program:
- Nuclear
MS. HARF: Tomorrow, the 6th and 7th, at the technical level, as part of our ongoing discussions on the sidelines of the NPT meeting that’s taking place in New York. And then next week, we will go for the fourth round of comprehensive talks in Vienna at the political director level with Cathy Ashton, Foreign Minister Zarif, and all of us.
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QUESTION: And when Zarif says that you’re at 50 to 60 percent agreement, would you say he’s accurate there?
MS. HARF: Well, I think I’ll say what other U.S. officials have said, that I’m not going to put a percentage on it. We haven’t even started drafting yet. We have had meetings of great substance where we have made progress, but a few points I think I would make: First is it doesn’t matter until we get to 100, because as we said in the JPOA, nothing is agreed until everything’s agreed, so we could get to 95 percent and still not have an agreement. So really, what we’re focused on is getting to 100 percent, and these next three months will be difficult at times. This is a very tough negotiation with very complicated issues. And I don’t want anyone to think a deal is imminent. We have made progress, but we have a lot more work to do. All I care about is 100 percent.
QUESTION: Right. So let’s say you are at this point or in late June at 90 percent. Do you draft 90 percent of said agreement and then save the hard parts for July or --
MS. HARF: I think they’re all hard parts. There’s not a lot of easy parts.
I think one way to think about it, and other folks have used this as well, is it’s sort of like a Rubik’s Cube, right? Like you – if your ultimate goal is to get resolution of the issue, right, to make it look perfect, then all the different parts play into that. So how you ensure Iran can never get a nuclear weapon and they can only use their program for peaceful purposes, when you talk about each of the individual issues, they all play into eventually getting to that place. So what each of those pieces looks like could be a little different, right, and that’s part of what the negotiation is about it: Well, does this – what do centrifuges look like, what does this look like, what does enrichment look like. And there’s not one answer; there’s a couple, which actually is helpful, right? So that all plays into how we eventually get to this final process. So there’s some give and take among the issues, but where there’s absolutely no give and take is what our final goal is.
QUESTION: Right. But you definitely – clearly, you feel comfortable enough to start drafting the deal.
MS. HARF: Absolutely. We’ve talked about all the issues in the first three rounds; we’ve seen where – we can already see some areas of agreement or at least where there’s a path forward and been very clear about where there will be tougher negotiations ahead. But we do feel like we can start drafting and do feel like we can get this done by July 20th. We don’t know if we will, if we’ll all be able to, but we think we can.
