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Luers: Possible Solution for U.S.-Iran Nuclear Standoff

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewee: William H. Luers, President of the United Nations Association–USA
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor

March 13, 2008

William Luers, former U.S. envoy to Venezuela and Czechoslovakia, has proposed a multilateral nuclear-enrichment plan that he believes could end the current Iranian nuclear crisis. The plan, which he developed with Thomas R. Pickering and Jim Walsh, would replace Iran’s own enrichment activities. Luers says the Bush administration is unlikely to accept it, and the Iranians are waiting for the United States to move first. Thus, any movement will have to await the next U.S. administration. “There’s no good approach to this, and we don’t claim that this is a great solution,” says Luers. “We claim it’s the best of a bad lot.”

You, Thomas R. Pickering, and Jim Walsh have published an article in the New York Review of Books offering what you call “a solution” for the U.S.-Iran nuclear standoff. Do you want to expound first on what the proposal actually consists of?

The proposal we have, which is subject to negotiation with Iranians if we ever get to that point, is that the United States would work with several countries—possibly France, Germany, possibly the United Kingdom—and work with Iran to negotiate a consortium, or what is called a “multilateral fuel-cycle facility,” on Iranian territory that would encompass the Iranians’ existing work with their centrifuges to enrich uranium. It would become a partnership with Iran to further develop their nuclear capacity for peaceful uses, and be accompanied by a very strict and thorough regime of inspections and monitoring that would make certain that Iran did not produce highly enriched uranium, which is what would be necessary for nuclear weapons. It would also bar a heavy-water reactor, which could develop plutonium for nuclear weapons, and would encompass other constraints on Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear-weapons capacity.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.