The Iran deal is working. Here's how we know. - By John F. Kerry
By John F. Kerry September 29 at 7:49 PM
John F. Kerry, a visiting distinguished statesman at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, was U.S. secretary of state from 2013 to 2017.
If the United States breaks with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the six other signatories and the conclusions of our own State Department by decertifying Iran’s compliance with the nuclear agreement, the deal’s fate will rest with Congress under the terms of the 2015 Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act. It would be facing a decision about America’s security, not a referendum on President Trump or former president Barack Obama.
Having cast dozens of arms-control votes as a senator — judging not whether they were perfect, but whether we were better off with them — I want to take those who may soon cast a similar vote “into the negotiating room” to explain the product we negotiated to close Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon, and why it is so important to keep the agreement in place.
Context matters. When I first met with Iran’s foreign minister in September 2013, Iran had mastered the nuclear fuel cycle, had built a uranium stockpile that could be enriched to make 10 to 12 bombs, and was enriching just below weapons-grade. It was moving rapidly to commission a heavy-water reactor capable of producing enough weapons-grade plutonium for an additional bomb or two annually. In other words, Iran was already a nuclear-threshold state.
We spent thousands of hours negotiating to get it right, even though Iran’s break-out time to produce enough fissile material for a bomb was just a few months. The United States had, through painstaking diplomacy, marshaled our European allies and reluctant countries — including China, Russia, India and Turkey — to implement crippling sanctions on Iran, but even that hadn’t stopped it from speeding ahead from a few hundred centrifuges to thousands. Only negotiation would freeze and roll back the program.
Some ask why our agreement didn’t stop Iran’s destabilizing behavior, including its support of Hezbollah and the brutal Assad regime in Syria. It’s a good question with good answers: We were not going to bargain away certainty on the nuclear issue for anything else; as France said, there would be no “quid pro quo.” We had deep disagreements with Iran and zero trust, hadn’t negotiated with them since 1979, and were on a collision course toward military action as the countdown clock on break-out ticked down.
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