The town of Lausanne was a perfect place to make peace. Prosperous, orderly and beautiful from every angle, looking up to the Alps or down to Lake Geneva, it is a living advertisement for the benefits of 170 years without conflict.



Lord Byron came to Lausanne to write, and Coco Chanel lived out her last years here. The Swiss lakeside town represented another end of the world from the violence now engulfing the Middle East and a constant reminder of the alternative to war. The aim of the intense negotiations here over the past two weeks over Iran’s nuclear programme was to provide that alternative.

Locked for much of the time in conference rooms in the nineteenth century Beau-Rivage Palace Hotel, the negotiators tried to make the most of the extraordinary setting. On most days, the US secretary of state, John Kerry, dressed from head to toe in black lycra and went for a bicycle ride along the lake shore. As soon as he arrived on Sunday, the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, put on a jogging suit and ran along the same route. More sedately, Iran’s Mohammad Javad Zarif would take morning walks by the placid waters, trailed by his entourage and a swarm of cameras. The Russian delegation would gather each morning on the hotel terrace to smoke, chat and gaze at the snow-capped peaks to the east.



The Lausanne accord when it came, marked a peak at the top of a long, winding uphill road. They were a test of diplomatic stamina which took the nuclear negotiators to way-stations around Europe, New York, through the Middle East and as far as central Asia. The latest phase, characterised by intensive and near continuous contacts between Barack Obama’s administration and Hassan Rouhani’s government in Tehran, has lasted more than 18 months, but that was just the last stretch on a long slog since Iran first admitted the existence of its nuclear programme in 2003.

But it is not quite the end of the road. The full details of a comprehensive deal outlining the shape of Iran’s future nuclear programme will not be finalised until the end of June. Every diplomat in Lausanne was anxious to stress that a lot can still go wrong when the work begins on the fine print and the issues left unresolved. But there is also little doubt that the accord reached in Lausanne marks a high point of compromise so far, which many thought would never be achieved, because of the concessions required of each side. The road ahead may be dotted by potential pitfalls but some of the hardest work has been done. It is already the longest diplomatic marathon in modern times. If and when it is completed, its significance is like to rank alongside any major treaty since the second world war.

Iranians celebrate on the streets of Tehran. Photograph: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA

When Kerry met Zarif at the UN general assembly in September 2013, it was a historic rarity for two countries that had not had diplomatic relations for 33 years. By the time the framework deal was agreed, the two men had spent more time in each other’s company than with any other foreign official. The pressure from hardliners back home gave the negotiators common cause. And Kerry took Zarif’s recommendation on the best Persian restaurant in Switzerland. The US energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, bonded with his opposite number, Ali Akbar Salehi, over physics and shared years teaching and studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When Salehi became a grandfather for the first time during the Lausanne talks, the New York Times reported, Moniz presented him with baby gifts embossed with the MIT logo. It was Moniz and Salehi who ended up resolving the last substantive difference between the two sides, about Iranian development work on new centrifuges, facing each other across a table in the Beau-Rivage Palace Hotel at 6am after a long night, with the sky just beginning to lighten above the Alps.



They worked through weekends and holidays. As the talks approached and passed a deadline in July 2014 in Vienna, Zarif worked through Ramadan, but it was impossible to negotiate and fast at the same time. Shia Islam exempts you from fasting for ten days if you are away from home, but if you want to extend the exemption after that you have to travel just over 25 miles a day (equivalent to 8 farsang, an ancient measure of distance) to justify it. So Zarif would get in a car every day and be driven in and out of the Austrian capital until he had clocked up the requisite mileage.

The foreign ministers came and went, but the technical experts often stayed behind, renting apartments in the host cities. One European non-proliferation expert missed most of the early life of his first child, spending three-quarters of his time on the road. A few of the negotiators received lucrative job offers during the course of the talks but had to defer them until the deal was done. Kerry’s deputy and master-negotiator, Bill Burns, had to put off retirement because both the Obama administration and the Iranians insisted that he stay. At critical points along the way, the technical and legal specialists often had to negotiate through the night.

“A lot of time it is not a matter of who is the smartest person in the room. It is a question of who has the most stamina,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former state department official who worked on the Iran dossier. “And Kerry had an incredible amount of stamina.”

The desired end-state of the negotiation was clear enough: Iran’s programme had to be limited so that it would take the country’s leaders at least a year to make a bomb, if they decided to do so, giving the rest of the world time to react. In return, the stifling sanctions regime buildup over the past nine years would be dismantled.

However, getting to that end-state has been endlessly complex. Fixing Iran’s “breakout” time at a year is a function of numbers of centrifuges, their efficiency and the already low stockpile of enriched uranium. To verify their calculations, American scientists constructed mock-up cascades of Iran’s centrifuges, using machines of the same vintage taken from Libya. Working at a classified site, the centrifuges were spun in an effort to determine how long they would take to produce a bomb’s worth of weapons-grade uranium. The UK and Israel, and perhaps other western European states, also had smaller-scale centrifuge mock-ups, and made their own calculations of breakout times.

The complexities were not just scientific. The web of interlocking international sanctions posed dense legal challenges when it came to drawing up a timetable for their lifting that was acceptable to all sides.

While the technicians and lawyers could plot a path for an agreement, it took a series of political decisions to decide to follow that path. There was nothing inevitable about those decisions. The negotiations often seemed ill-starred, centred on a dysfunctional relationship between the US and Iran. When the mild reformist Mohammad Khatami was president in Tehran, the US was led by George W Bush, who dismissed Iran as part of an “axis of evil”, and shrugged off Khatami’s secret overtures after the Iraq invasion in 2003.

Barack Obama arrived in the White House in 2009, offering “an outstretched hand” if adversarial states like Iran “unclench your fist”. But by that time, Khatami had been replaced as president by a mercurial hardliner, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the situation had escalated, with each wave of international sanctions leading to a defiant expansion of the Iranian nuclear programme. The tit-for-tat brinkmanship entered new and dangerous territory weeks after Obama’s inauguration, when Ahmadinejad’s government began making 20%-enriched uranium, taking the country a substantial step closer to making weapons grade (90%-enriched) uranium.

The crisis triggered in the west was deepened by the discovery of a secret underground bunker at a Revolutionary Guards base at Fordow, about 20 miles from Qom. On 25 September, Obama, Britain’s then prime minister, Gordon Brown, and the then French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, took the stage at an economic summit in Pittsburgh, to reveal Fordow’s existence. Iran had declared it to the nuclear watchdog organisation, the International Atomic Energy Agency, a few days earlier, but that appeared to be hasty damage limitation after realising the secret was out.

Tense moments at the talks. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AP

The revelation came as a complete surprise to the Russians who had been Tehran’s principal defenders on the six-nation group that was supposed to be negotiating over the nuclear programme. Moscow issued a rare public rebuke, adding to the intense pressure on Tehran.

In October 2009, Ahmadinejad provisionally agreed to swap Iran’s stockpile of 20% uranium for manufactured fuel rods for its Tehran research reactor, but he failed to win the backing of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, or the opposition groups, who were all reluctant to allow Ahmadinejad a foreign policy triumph. The turmoil in Iranian politics was working against a deal.

Despite that failure, all sides had an interest in continuing negotiations, if only to fend off the rising threat of Israel taking matters into its own hands and carrying out air strikes in a bid to set back Iranian progress. The talks wandered from one city to another, from Istanbul, to Baghdad, Moscow and Almaty, accomplishing little. The diplomats from a six-nation group – US, UK, France, Germany, Russia and China – and the Iranian negotiator, Saeed Jalili, sat opposite each other and largely talked past each other.

The western states were convinced that if they managed to ratchet up sanctions, Iran would eventually capitulate. Jalili demanded the world should agree to lift sanctions and recognise Iran’s right to enrich uranium. In Moscow in June 2012, the Iranian diplomat brought along a PowerPoint presentation, raising hopes of a new initiative, but it turned out just to be a new means of delivering an old message. On some occasions in these dispiriting sessions, it took months to agree a venue for the next round.

In February 2013, the Obama White House decided to try something new. After the latest round of fruitless talks with Jalili at the end of that month, two members of the US team, a White House advisor on Iran, Puneet Talwar, and the state department arms control specialist, Robert Einhorn, peeled off and instead of going home, flew secretly to the Omani capital, Muscat.

There they joined Bill Burns and Jake Sullivan, Vice President Biden’s national security advisor, who were waiting for them in a luxury seaside villa owned by Oman’s ruler, Sultan Qaboos bin Said. Secluded in the villa, advised not to go out for fear of being identified, they waited for the arrival of an Iranian emissary, deputy foreign minister, Ali Asghar Khaji.

A secret back-channel had finally been established and the negotiators returned to the Sultan’s house several times. But there was no progress. The positions may have been more informally expressed but they remained the same irreconcilable positions as ever.

The most important breakthrough in the convoluted history of the talks came, not in the negotiating chamber, but on the streets of Iran’s cities. The Obama administration expected Jalili, the Supreme Leader’s favoured candidate, to win the presidential elections in June 2013. But the Americans had overestimated Khamenei’s degree of control. It was a pragmatist, Rouhani, who was elected, in part as a result of public confidence that he could transform Iran’s dysfunctional relationship with the west.

Almost overnight after Rouhani’s inauguration, the tenor of the conversations changed. The new Iranian negotiators, Majid Takht-Ravanchi and Abbas Araqchi, were far more businesslike; less interested in arguing principles than in making arrangements. It was quickly agreed than Kerry would hold his historic meeting with Zarif, the newly appointed foreign minister, in late September. Crucially, when the two men met in the margins of the UN general assembly, they exchanged email addresses and private numbers.

The White House was hoping for an even greater prize, a handshake between Obama and Rouhani. The new Iranian president however, was not sufficiently confident in his political footing back home. Instead, Rouhani would take a call on his mobile phone when he was being driven to the airport from the UN. Obama apologised for the New York traffic, and the two leaders voiced their mutual appreciation of each other’s nations. Rouhani signed by telling the American president to “have a nice day” and Obama replied “Khodahafez”, Farsi for “God go with you”.

Obama stayed personally engaged in the negotiations until the very end. He held several videoconference calls with his national security team, Kerry and Moniz over the course of the Lausanne talks. At midnight on the last night of negotiations, he called Kerry.

A senior administration official recalled: “His direction was: you people know my bottom lines and I trust my negotiating team out there, so that by the time I wake up we can have this closed out.”

As it happened the negotiations were still going when the president woke up.



The negotiating team in Lausanne were used to the roller-coaster by then. Several times in the last few days, they thought they had a done deal only for it to unravel

“We had a lot of up and down, with lot of hope one moment and an hour later you wondered if you were going to get on an airplane,” a senior administration official said.

In the end, both sides had far too much to lose for them to walk away. They stayed up through the night to make sure the wrung the last drop from each other’s negotiating position. By the time they flew away, the deal had been done.