Nov 16, 2014

The head of Iran's parliamentary nuclear committee said during the latest nuclear talks in Oman that the United States presented an 8-page recommendation that took the nuclear negotiations between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany (P5+1) "back to zero.”

In an interview with Tasnim News Agency, Ebrahim Karkhaneh said that during the Nov. 9 trilateral talks between Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, US Secretary of State John Kerry and former European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton a proposal was recommended by the United States that would turn Iran’s nuclear program into nothing more than “decoration.”

Karkhaneh claimed that with the recommendations, the United States had “thrown off the equations in the negotiations” and called it a “nuclear Turkmenchay treaty,” referring to the 1828 treaty in which Iran signed over territories to Russia after military defeats. According to him, “without a doubt” Iran’s negotiators would not agree to these terms.

While Karkhaneh did not specify the number of centrifuges recommended by the United States, he said that it was a “decorative spinning of centrifuges.” Iran currently has 9,400 spinning centrifuges. Iran Nuclear, a website close to former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, reported that in the Oman talks, Iran was offered 4,500 centrifuges. This has not been verified by any other source and the website in general has had a hard-line view with respect to the negotiations.

Karkhaneh said that Iran would also be limited to “research and development to [first] generation centrifuges.” These would be IR-1 centrifuges, which are based on a 40-year-old European design.