Today, after two years of negotiations, the United States,
together with our international partners, has achieved something that
decades of animosity has not — a comprehensive, long-term deal with Iran
that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
This deal demonstrates that American diplomacy can bring
about real and meaningful change — change that makes our country, and
the world, safer and more secure. This deal is also in line with a
tradition of American leadership. It’s now more than 50 years since
President Kennedy stood before the American people and said, “Let us
never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” He was
speaking then about the need for discussions between the United States
and the Soviet Union, which led to efforts to restrict the spread of
nuclear weapons.
In those days, the risk was a catastrophic nuclear war
between two super powers. In our time, the risk is that nuclear weapons
will spread to more and more countries, particularly in the Middle East,
the most volatile region in our world.
Today, because America negotiated from a position of
strength and principle, we have stopped the spread of nuclear weapons in
this region. Because of this deal, the international community will be
able to verify that the Islamic Republic of Iran will not develop a
nuclear weapon.
This deal meets every single one of the bottom lines that
we established when we achieved a framework earlier this spring. Every
pathway to a nuclear weapon is cut off. And the inspection and
transparency regime necessary to verify that objective will be put in
place. Because of this deal, Iran will not produce the highly enriched
uranium and weapons-grade plutonium that form the raw materials
necessary for a nuclear bomb.
Because of this deal, Iran will remove two-thirds of its
installed centrifuges — the machines necessary to produce highly
enriched uranium for a bomb — and store them under constant
international supervision. Iran will not use its advanced centrifuges to
produce enriched uranium for the next decade. Iran will also get rid of
98 percent of its stockpile of enriched uranium.
To put that in perspective, Iran currently has a stockpile
that could produce up to 10 nuclear weapons. Because of this deal, that
stockpile will be reduced to a fraction of what would be required for a
single weapon. This stockpile limitation will last for 15 years.
Because of this deal, Iran will modify the core of its
reactor in Arak so that it will not produce weapons-grade plutonium. And
it has agreed to ship the spent fuel from the reactor out of the
country for the lifetime of the reactor. For at least the next 15 years,
Iran will not build any new heavy-water reactors.
Because of this deal, we will, for the first time, be in a
position to verify all of these commitments. That means this deal is
not built on trust; it is built on verification. Inspectors will have
24/7 access to Iran’s key nuclear facilities.
Inspectors will have access to
Iran’s entire nuclear supply chain — its uranium mines and mills, its
conversion facility, and its centrifuge manufacturing and storage
facilities. This ensures that Iran will not be able to divert materials
from known facilities to covert ones. Some of these transparency
measures will be in place for 25 years.
Because of this deal, inspectors will also be able to
access any suspicious location. Put simply, the organization responsible
for the inspections, the IAEA, will have access where necessary, when
necessary. That arrangement is permanent. And the IAEA has also reached
an agreement with Iran to get access that it needs to complete its
investigation into the possible military dimensions of Iran’s past
nuclear research.
Finally, Iran is permanently prohibited from pursuing a
nuclear weapon under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which
provided the basis for the international community’s efforts to apply
pressure on Iran.
As Iran takes steps to implement this deal, it will
receive relief from the sanctions that we put in place because of Iran’s
nuclear program — both America’s own sanctions and sanctions imposed by
the United Nations Security Council. This relief will be phased in.
Iran must complete key nuclear steps before it begins to receive new
sanctions relief. And over the course of the next decade, Iran must
abide by the deal before additional sanctions are lifted, including five
years for restrictions related to arms, and eight years for
restrictions related to ballistic missiles.
All of this will be memorialized and endorsed in a new
United Nations Security Council resolution. And if Iran violates the
deal, all of these sanctions will snap back into place. So there’s a
very clear incentive for Iran to follow through, and there are very real
consequences for a violation.
That’s the deal. It has the full backing of the
international community. Congress will now have an opportunity to review
the details, and my administration stands ready to provide extensive
briefings on how this will move forward.
As the American people and Congress review the deal, it
will be important to consider the alternative. Consider what happens in a
world without this deal. Without this deal, there is no scenario where
the world joins us in sanctioning Iran until it completely dismantles
its nuclear program. Nothing we know about the Iranian government
suggests that it would simply capitulate under that kind of pressure.
And the world would not support an effort to permanently sanction Iran
into submission. We put sanctions in place to get a diplomatic
resolution, and that is what we have done.
Without this deal, there would be no agreed-upon
limitations for the Iranian nuclear program. Iran could produce, operate
and test more and more centrifuges. Iran could fuel a reactor capable
of producing plutonium for a bomb. And we would not have any of the
inspections that allow us to detect a covert nuclear weapons program. In
other words, no deal means no lasting constraints on Iran’s nuclear
program.
Such a scenario would make it more likely that other
countries in the region would feel compelled to pursue their own nuclear
programs, threatening a nuclear arms race in the most volatile region
of the world. It would also present the United States with fewer and
less effective options to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
I’ve been President and Commander-in-Chief for over six
years now. Time and again, I have faced decisions about whether or not
to use military force. It’s the gravest decision that any President has
to make. Many times, in multiple countries, I have decided to use force.
And I will never hesitate to do so when it is in our national security
interest. I strongly believe that our national security interest now
depends upon preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon — which
means that without a diplomatic resolution, either I or a future U.S.
President would face a decision about whether or not to allow Iran to
obtain a nuclear weapon or whether to use our military to stop it.
Put simply, no deal means a greater chance of more war in
the Middle East. Moreover, we give nothing up by testing whether or not
this problem can be solved peacefully. If, in a worst-case scenario,
Iran violates the deal, the same options that are available to me today
will be available to any U.S. President in the future. And I have no
doubt that 10 or 15 years from now, the person who holds this office
will be in a far stronger position with Iran further away from a weapon
and with the inspections and transparency that allow us to monitor the
Iranian program.
For this reason, I believe it would be irresponsible to
walk away from this deal. But on such a tough issue, it is important
that the American people and their representatives in Congress get a
full opportunity to review the deal. After all, the details matter. And
we’ve had some of the finest nuclear scientists in the world working
through those details. And we’re dealing with a country — Iran — that
has been a sworn adversary of the United States for over 35 years. So I
welcome a robust debate in Congress on this issue, and I welcome
scrutiny of the details of this agreement.
But I will remind Congress that you don’t make deals like
this with your friends. We negotiated arms control agreements with the
Soviet Union when that nation was committed to our destruction. And
those agreements ultimately made us safer.
I am confident that this deal will meet the national
security interest of the United States and our allies. So I will veto
any legislation that prevents the successful implementation of this
deal.
We do not have to accept an inevitable spiral into
conflict. And we certainly shouldn’t seek it. And precisely because the
stakes are so high, this is not the time for politics or posturing.
Tough talk from Washington does not solve problems. Hard-nosed
diplomacy, leadership that has united the world’s major powers offers a
more effective way to verify that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapon.
Now, that doesn’t mean that this deal will resolve all of
our differences with Iran. We share the concerns expressed by many of
our friends in the Middle East, including Israel and the Gulf States,
about Iran’s support for terrorism and its use of proxies to destabilize
the region. But that is precisely why we are taking this step — because
an Iran armed with a nuclear weapon would be far more destabilizing and
far more dangerous to our friends and to the world.
Meanwhile, we will maintain our own sanctions related to
Iran’s support for terrorism, its ballistic missile program, and its
human rights violations. We will continue our unprecedented efforts to
strengthen Israel’s security — efforts that go beyond what any American
administration has done before. And we will continue the work we began
at Camp David to elevate our partnership with the Gulf States to
strengthen their capabilities to counter threats from Iran or terrorist
groups like ISIL.
However, I believe that we must continue to test whether
or not this region, which has known so much suffering, so much
bloodshed, can move in a different direction.
Time and again, I have made clear to the Iranian people
that we will always be open to engagement on the basis of mutual
interests and mutual respect. Our differences are real and the difficult
history between our nations cannot be ignored. But it is possible to
change. The path of violence and rigid ideology, a foreign policy based
on threats to attack your neighbors or eradicate Israel — that’s a dead
end. A different path, one of tolerance and peaceful resolution of
conflict, leads to more integration into the global economy, more
engagement with the international community, and the ability of the
Iranian people to prosper and thrive.
This deal offers an opportunity to move in a new direction. We should seize it.
We have come a long way to reach this point — decades of
an Iranian nuclear program, many years of sanctions, and many months of
intense negotiation. Today, I want to thank the members of Congress from
both parties who helped us put in place the sanctions that have proven
so effective, as well as the other countries who joined us in that
effort.
I want to thank our negotiating partners — the United
Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, China, as well as the European Union —
for our unity in this effort, which showed that the world can do
remarkable things when we share a vision of peacefully addressing
conflicts. We showed what we can do when we do not split apart.
And finally, I want to thank the American negotiating
team. We had a team of experts working for several weeks straight on
this, including our Secretary of Energy, Ernie Moniz. And I want to
particularly thank John Kerry, our Secretary of State, who began his
service to this country more than four decades ago when he put on our
uniform and went off to war. He’s now making this country safer through
his commitment to strong, principled American diplomacy.
History shows that America must lead not just with our
might, but with our principles. It shows we are stronger not when we are
alone, but when we bring the world together. Today’s announcement marks
one more chapter in this pursuit of a safer and more helpful and more
hopeful world.
Thank you. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America.
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