In this high-tech age of gadgets and gizmos, a simple whiteboard found in classrooms around the globe was the tool that helped negotiators seal the complex parameters of a Iran nuclear deal.
Until the final hours, US diplomats, who had spent eight days locked in a Lausanne hotel hammering out the outlines of what could be one of the most complex arms-control treaties ever, feared their efforts would be in vain.
Three times, US Secretary of State John Kerry’s plane was put on standby to leave. Luggage was collected from his team of negotiators and staff as well as from the traveling press. Three times, the flight was pushed back.
Photo: AFP
“It was quite a rollercoaster. We’d get close, we kept on changing the plane schedule. It would go, it wouldn’t go. We had to reset the clock,” a senior US Department of State official said.
In the last two days, they sensed the deal was close.
“You know what the elements are, but knocking it out is another story altogether,” the official said.
For the Americans, they had to reach a complicated formula of interlocking parts to ensure that it would take Iran a year to gather enough fissile material to build a bomb, by reducing stocks and cutting back its facilities.
In return, Iran was seeking an end to a labyrinth of global sanctions, which Kerry was insistent would not all be lifted in one fell swoop, while demanding a tough verification process to ensure Tehran was sticking by the deal.
It was the highly organized US Undersecretary for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman, who has led the negotiations, who early on hit on the idea of a whiteboard as a way of illustrating what she has long referred to as a “Rubik’s cube.”
In Lausanne, the whiteboard on wheels followed her from room to room as she and Kerry met with Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif and his team.
The idea was to try “to make sure that we and Iran were seeing the picture in the same way,” another senior administration official said.
The whiteboard appealed to the Iranian team “because if they get paper, they’ve got to take it back to Tehran,” the Department of State official said.
Kerry had his own version committed to paper to consult on the go.
There was one heart-stopping moment when a negotiator used a permanent marker to write down classified calculations. They took some frantic rubbing out.
The breakthrough came during the night of Wednesday to Thursday, when Kerry and Zarif and a small team sat down and negotiated through the night.
In a room next door, the rest of the US staff, fueled by constant calls to the hotel’s room service, sat ready to be “plucked out” if needed.
Hundreds of staff back in the US, especially at the California-based Lawrence Livermore national laboratory — which specializes in non-proliferation and guarding nuclear arms stockpiles — were on standby at the end of the phones.
“It was just a very integrated, very interactive back-and-forth kind of a process,” the Department of State official said.
In the end, each side made compromises. Iran agreed its unfinished Arak heavy water reactor will not produce plutonium, slashed the number of centrifuges by two-thirds to 6,000 and will redesign its Fordo facility into a research center.
The Americans said 1,000 centrifuges could stay in Fordo, even though they will not be used.
“We gave some things that are hard for us. Having even one centrifuge in Fordo is hard,” the Department of State official said.
Inevitably, there were last-minute glitches as the talks resumed on Thursday after Kerry snatched an hour’s sleep, especially as all the other ministers from the so-called P5+1 also had to sign off on the deal.
However, “a certain momentum takes over, everybody begins to realize it’s going to happen, and that momentum helps to get the problem solved.”
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