President Obama announces Iran deal from the White House Tuesday morning.
Twenty months after formal negotiations began, Iran and six world powers have produced an agreement designed to curtail Iran's nuclear program for 15 years in exchange for lifting international economic and oil sanctions. The agreement requires Iran to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium by 98 percent, mothball two-thirds of the centrifuges it uses to carry out enrichment, turn a once-secret centrifuge facility into a research center, redesign the Arak reactor that could produce plutonium for a bomb and open itself to the most intrusive nuclear inspection regime ever imposed on any nation.
Here is the entire text of the agreement. Here is a link to the president's address.
In an early morning address at the White House that was broadcast live in Iran, President Obama said compliance with the agreement is "not built on trust, it is built on verification." He now faces what is certain to be a contentious debate in Congress over the deal a large percentage of Republicans—particularly the bomb-bomb-bomb crowd—as well as some Democrats will likely oppose:
But Mr. Obama made it abundantly clear that he would fight to preserve the deal in its entirety, saying, “I will veto any legislation that prevents the successful implementation of this deal.”
Not everyone was celebrating the accord. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called it a “historic mistake” that would ultimately create a “terrorist nuclear superpower.”
The agreement's foes will have a difficult path. They need a two-thirds majority to overcome any presidential vetoes and putting together that many votes in the matter seems out of reach.
Without an agreement, the Obama administration says, Iran currently has the technological skills, facilities and fissionable material to build a nuclear bomb within two to three months. Taken altogether the agreement extends this so-called "break-out" capacity to more than a year. In the latter years of the agreement, and something that foes of the deal will surely raise during debate, the break-out time will gradually dwindle as Iran is allowed to install more sophisticated centrifuges that can enrich uranium 20 times faster than the models it now uses. But by then the world could be a very different place.
Assuming nothing intervenes to block the agreement, which seems highly unlikely, it is a major diplomatic victory for President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and the negotiators of France, Germany, Britain, China and Russia. The agreement could also bring about an era of improved relations between the U.S. and Iran after 36 years of ferocious antagonism and a 12-year stand-off over Iran's nuclear program. That stand-off was punctuated by repeated right-wing calls for air attacks on Iran's nuclear facilities.
Any attacks, in addition to killing large numbers of Iranian civilians, would certainly have produced a strong military response from Iran, something the proponents chose to ignore the way they always ignore blowback and the other consequences of such actions.