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Obama's Top WMD Ex-Official on the Iran Nuclear Talks

(TIME) Michael Crowley - Gary Samore served until January as the Obama White House's coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction - making him the Administration's point man on the Iran nuclear issue. On the eve of the Iran talks, Samore said in an interview: "The single most important issue is whether Iran offers to accept limits on its overall enrichment capacity: limits as defined by the number of centrifuges, the type of centrifuges, the number of enrichment locations and the stockpile of enriched material they have on hand. The goal of these limits is to prevent Iran from enriching large amounts of uranium quickly....Without offering some kind of limits on capacity, any proposal Iran makes is not going to be taken seriously." "There's a fundamental conflict of national interest between the U.S. and Iran. They want to have a nuclear-weapons capability. We're not going to be able to persuade them that having a nuclear-weapons option is a bad idea. They're deeply committed to that and have been for decades." "We also need to realize that, down the road, the agreement could fall apart....So people shouldn't view any deal as a comprehensive agreement that ends this once and for all. They should view it as a way to buy time, in the hopes that the next Iranian government has a different calculation of their national interest."
2013-10-16 00:00:00
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