The parties to the Iran nuclear deal that traded sanctions relief for constraints on Tehran’s fissile materials program were to gather in Vienna on Nov. 29 for a seventh round of talks about bringing the U.S. and the Islamic Republic back into the deal, diplomats from some of those countries said Wednesday.
Ali Bagheri Kani of Iran’s foreign ministry and Mikhail Ulyanov, Russia’s permanent representative to international organizations in Vienna, announced the development on Twitter within minutes of each other. Bagheri was first.
In a phone call with @enriquemora_ , we agreed to start the negotiations aiming at removal of unlawful & inhumane sanctions on 29 November in Vienna.
— علی باقریکنی (@Bagheri_Kani) November 3, 2021
BREAKING NEWS! The #ViennaTalks on restoration of #JCPOA will resume on November 29. This long-awaited collective decision opens the way to #US #sanctions lifting and return of #Iran to full implementation of nuclear provisions of 2015 deal.
— Mikhail Ulyanov (@Amb_Ulyanov) November 3, 2021
Not long afterward, State Department spokesperson Ned Price confirmed that Robert Malley, the U.S. special representative for Iran, would attend the scheduled talks.
Also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the Iran nuclear deal was forged in 2015 by the Barack Obama administration. The non-treaty pact eased economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for limitations on the Middle Eastern country’s uranium enrichment program. Then-President Donald Trump abandoned the deal in 2017 and reimposed sanctions, after which Iran began enriching uranium again, each time to a greater concentration of the weaponizable U-235 isotope.
“We’ve said this many times before, but we believe it remains possible to quickly reach and implement an understanding on a mutual return to compliance with the JCPOA by closing the relatively small number of issues that remained outstanding at the end of June, when the sixth round concluded,” Price said during his daily press briefing on Wednesday from Foggy Bottom. “But we’ve also been clear, including as this pause has dragged on for some time, that this window of opportunity will not be open forever,” said Price.
Price declined to say exactly when the knowledge Iran gained from enriching uranium after the U.S. left the deal would become too great for Tehran to return, from a U.S. perspective, to meaningful compliance with the JCPOA — an accord that could still provide “permanent and verifiable limits on Iran’s nuclear program and it would foreclose Iran’s ability to ever acquire a nuclear weapon,” Price said.
Recently, Jill Hruby, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) told colleagues in an email that longtime civil servant David Huizenga would become a special assistant to the administrator. In that role, the 30-year Department of Energy veteran would “initially be focused on negotiations with Iran on a return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.”
However, Huizenga was not scheduled to begin his new duties until December. The NNSA declined to comment about the delegation to Vienna.
