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As oil prices fall, Iran feels pressure to seal nuclear deal

Mohammad Heydarian, an Iranian contractor, still has work finishing off a single-family home. But things look bleak after that, he said. He has already fired his workers, and he is struggling to make ends meet, providing for his wife and two teenage children. ‘My life became a fight trying to prevent regression, but I lost,’ said Heydarian, 46.

For more than a year, President Hassan Rouhani has been dangling the prospect of a bright economic future before the middle classes that elected him, promising to negotiate a deal with the West to limit Iran’s nuclear program and in that way end the sanctions hobbling the Iranian economy.

With the deadline of Nov. 24 fast approaching, it is far from clear whether the two camps will agree on a pact that would meet the West’s demands to extend the time it would take Iran to make a bomb, and fulfill Iran’s demand that it have the nuclear rights other nations enjoy. But American and European officials say they think they have some new leverage: falling oil prices that are adding to Iran’s pain at a time its oil revenue has dropped more than half because of sanctions.

With oil prices projected to go down even further, the oil-dependent government of Iran faces growing pressure to settle the nuclear standoff.

‘This is a new wild card, and we don’t know how it will play out,’ one of the senior Western negotiators said the other day, as officials mapped out a strategy that they hope can achieve a deal in less than a month’s time. Obama administration officials and the chief American negotiator, Wendy R. Sherman, were briefing lawmakers and allies last week on what has been agreed and what issues remain in dispute, hoping to building support in advance of an announcement.

The Iranians may be preparing the way as well. The Iranian news media reported in recent days that the United States had agreed to allow Iran to operate about 4,000 of its most basic centrifuges.

American officials have not confirmed the figure, but they have said that if they permit a higher number of centrifuges, the machines that enrich uranium then Iran would have to blend down or change the form of its current stocks of nuclear fuel.That would lengthen the time it would take to produce a weapon’s worth of fuel, and after that it would take more time months or years, to turn the fuel into a bomb. That would be a huge concession for the Iranians, who currently have 19,000 centrifuges, about 10,000 of which actually operate.
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