GENEVA — Iranian and American officials ended a round of high-level nuclear talks here on Monday considering a proposal that would strictly limit, for at least 10 years, Iran’s ability to produce nuclear material, but gradually ease restrictions on Tehran in the final years of any deal.
The proposed phasing out of restrictions is part of a broader effort to mollify critics in Tehran, where some hard-liners in the government and the military oppose any deal that would force Iran to forsake nuclear production for a generation, and Washington, where some members of Congress have objected to an agreement that would not impose lengthy restrictions on Iran’s program.
The question of how long any agreement would endure is a critical one: President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have said they will not sign an agreement that would give Iran the ability to produce enough fuel for a nuclear weapon in less than a year should it decide to “break out” of the accord. But it is also an issue that has sharply divided the two sides. While the United States has long insisted that an agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear program endure for a prolonged period, which could be 15 years or more, some Iranian officials have argued that an agreement allow their country to ramp up the number of centrifuges to enrich uranium in seven years or less.
Easing limits on Iran’s production during the later years of an accord would be an attempt to bridge the differences between the two sides over how long an agreement should last. If strict constraints on the number of centrifuges were maintained for the first 10 years of a potential 15-year agreement, for example, that would allow the Iranians to say the tough constraints would last for only 10 years and the Americans to say they had a 15-year agreement.
Limits on the number of centrifuges Iran would be allowed, and for how long, are only part of an enormously complex negotiation.
“The number in the abstract is meaningless,” Antony J. Blinken, the newly appointed deputy secretary of state, said at the Aspen Institute in Washington on Monday. Warning time, he added, depends on a number of other factors, including how the centrifuges are configured, whether new or more efficient centrifuges would be used for enrichment, and how much nuclear fuel Iran would be allowed to stockpile in the country. Part of an agreement would require Iran to ship much of its stockpile to Russia, but it is not clear yet how much.
The key, Mr. Blinken said, is getting an accord “that gives you plenty of time to do something” if Iran races for a bomb.
He said that he could not predict whether an agreement was possible, but that any deal would have to “cut off all pathway for Iran to get to a nuclear weapon,” including the covert path. That would require highly intrusive inspections, Mr. Blinken said, the details of which were still up for negotiations.
A report last week from the International Atomic Energy Agency indicated that after years of foot dragging, Iran has answered only one of a dozen questions, many based on evidence provided by the United States and Israel that the Iranian authorities have charged was fabricated.
“What has to result from any agreement is the strongest, most intrusive inspection and access program that any country has ever seen, because Iran has forfeited the trust of the international community,” Mr. Blinken said.
In talking about the effort to bridge the differences between the two sides, a senior American official traveling with Mr. Kerry and Energy Secretary Ernest J. Moniz said that the United States would insist that Iran be constrained for “at least a double-digit number of years” from having the ability to quickly break out of the accord.
The official, who could not be identified under the Obama administration’s protocol for briefing reporters, was deliberately vague on how long the provision on breakout time would need to be preserved beyond the first 10 years of an agreement, suggesting that the United States was looking for Iran to make concessions in return for the right to expand its capacity to produce enriched uranium for the final years of an accord.
Mr. Moniz dealt directly with Ali Akbar Salehi, the director of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, who joined Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, at the talks here. Mr. Salehi was a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology decades ago, when Mr. Moniz was a young professor there.
The negotiations, which Mr. Kerry joined Sunday night, sought to make progress toward an agreement before an end-of-March deadline for finalizing an outline of an agreement to limit Tehran’s nuclear program. The two sides plan to meet again next Monday.
“We have made some progress,” a senior administration official told reporters. “We still have a long way to go.”
The March deadline has become an important milestone as the White House is eager to show that progress is being made to dissuade Congress from moving to impose new sanctions on Iran.
It is unclear what form a March agreement might take, if it is reached. Would it be a signed document that the United States, its allies and Iran would make public? Or would it be a confidential record of the status of the talks on which Congress might be briefed but which would not be published? American officials did not say.
Asked at the start of Monday’s meeting how the negotiations were proceeding, Mr. Zarif said simply, “It is going.”
“Time is passing,” Mr. Kerry chimed in. “We are working.”
But some Western observers have also raised concerns that Mr. Salehi, who also served as foreign minister in Iran’s previous hard-line government, might seek to protect the country’s nuclear activities from being subjected to stringent limits and restrict Mr. Zarif’s room for maneuver.
In July, for example, Mr. Salehi argued that Iran needed to have industrial-scale ability to enrich uranium by 2021, when a contract under which Russia supplies fuel for Iran’s nuclear reactor at Bushehr is to expire.
When the negotiations were extended in November, United States officials outlined a two-step process for making progress. The first step, they said, would be to work out an agreement outlining the main provisions of an accord by the end of March. The final step would be to complete the entire accord, including its technical annexes, by the end of June.
Both sides have said they are not interested in extending the negotiating deadlines further.
Adding to the pressure to show progress, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, is scheduled to address Congress in early March to present his criticism of the potential accord. On Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu said it was “astonishing” that the talks were continuing since Iran had yet to answer longstanding questions that the International Atomic Energy Agency had posed about Tehran’s suspected earlier work on nuclear designs.
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