Updated | Malta welcomes Iran nuclear agreement

Seven-party talks have reached an “outline deal” on Iran’s nuclear programme. Tehran has reportedly agreed to have just one atomic facility, shut down two-thirds of its uranium centrifuges and to dismantle a reactor which produced plutonium.

 “We can now begin to draft the final text of the agreement and its attachments using the solutions achieved over the last three days” Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohamed Javad Zarif told a news conference.

Zarif cautioned that they were still “some time away” from where they wanted to be, however.

The deal was reached following eight days of intensive negotiations in Lausanne, Switzerland, coordinated by Federica Mogherini, the EU’s Foreign Policy Chief.

The deal is the first major step towards a comprehensive agreement which Iran and the six powers aim to conclude by the end of June.

One of the most sensitive issues during the negotiations, Iran’s research and development work, will also be limited.

Iran agreed to not conduct research and development associated with uranium enrichment for 15 years, according to a US fact sheet, which also says that Iran is to remove the 1,000 advanced second-generation centrifuges currently installed at the facility in Natanz and place them in International Atomic Energy Agency-monitored storage for ten years.

The fact sheet calculates that the measure will extend Iran’s breakout timeline – the time that it would take for it acquire enough fissile material for one weapon, currently assessed to be as little as two months –to at least one year, for a duration of at least ten years, under this framework.

Experts are not getting their hopes too high for now, noting that the framework deal is fragile. They believe it will be exponentially more difficult to reach a final comprehensive agreement than it was to agree to the framework deal.