Obama tells Iran US will ‘walk away’ from a bad nuclear deal

The emphatic language was matched by Hasan Rowhani’s threat that nuclear development will accelerate if talks collapse.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on the second anniversary of his election in Tehran, Iran.

As a deadline slipped for the US and Iran to lock in their in-principle deal to limit Tehran’s nuclear ­capacity, Barack Obama warned he would “walk away’’ if the terms failed to stack up. The US President’s emphatic language yesterday was matched by Iranian President Hasan Rowhani, who suggested his country would ­accelerate nuclear development if the talks collapsed.

While negotiators were given an additional week to nail down a deal to shut down the medium-term prospects of Iran acquiring a bomb, differences remain on how the framework agreement reached in April will be implemented, verified and rewarded.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, a party to the talks also involving representatives of the European powers and China, insisted a deal was within reach.

Mr Lavrov said the outstanding issues were “procedural’’ rather than technical, and could be ­sorted out.

In Washington, Mr Obama said the US would not accept a “bad deal’’ and his position from the start had been “extremely clear’’ that Iran could not retain the capacity to weaponise nuclear fuel.

“If we can’t provide assurances that the pathways for Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon are closed, and if we can’t verify that, if the ­inspections regime, verifications regime, is inadequate, then we’re not going to get a deal,’’ he said. “Ultimately, this is going to be up to the Iranians.’’

Mr Rowhani said the deal, if ratified, had to stick. “If the other side breaches the deal, we will go back to the same old path, stronger than what they can imagine,” he told state-controlled information service ISNA.

Encouragingly, Iran was reported to have accepted an important condition to cap its stockpile of lower-enriched uranium and convert the surplus into a form of fuel that would be unsuitable for ­refining to weapons grade.

This was expected to be ­confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency today.

Israel and Sunni Arab states, ­including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, have lined up against the deal, deeply sceptical that Iran will ­honour its promises and not hoodwink the West by going along with a regime that can be junked once the payoff of eased economic sanctions is delivered.

Critics say Mr Obama has given away too much to notch up a win in the sunset of his presidency. Under the framework agreement hammered out eight weeks ago, Iran agreed to drastically reduce the eight tonnes of nuclear fuel it has stockpiled and to take offline two-thirds of the centrifuges run to enrich uranium.

One underground nuclear ­facility would be turned into a ­research centre, another would be modified to produce only fuel for civilian purposes and a heavy water reactor would lose most of its capacity to make plutonium, an alternative avenue to a bomb.

In return, painful sanctions that have suffocated the Iranian economy by choking its lifeblood oil ­exports and ability to earn foreign currency will be progressively ­lifted, paving the way for foreign companies to get back into a lucrative market that has been closed to outside investment since the ayatollahs seized control a generation ago.

But turning the 505-word joint statement drawn up in a Swiss lakeside hotel into a highly technical manual running to dozens of pages has turned out to be just as fraught as was tipped when the in-principle agreement was announced to jubilation on the streets of Tehran. Sticking points include the pace and timing of sanctions relief, the mechanism for their “snapback” in the event of non-compliance and Iran’s potential to develop newer, faster centrifuges to decrease the breakout time from the deal.

The US wants inspectors from the IAEA to have unfettered ­access to all nuclear sites, including bases run by the Iranian military, something the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, last week rejected.

Additional reporting: AFP