Iran won't discuss military programme, say officials

Iran has made clear that it will only discuss nuclear issues and not its military programme as negotiations start for a comprehensive agreement aimed at settling a decades-long dispute over Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

Iran's negotiating team, led by its foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, and senior negotiators from Britain, France, Germany, China, Russia and the US – the group known as P5+1 – gathered in Vienna on Tuesday to find a workable framework before they could discuss details in future sessions.

The Vienna talks come just a few months after both sides agreed on a landmark interim six month deal, but diplomats cautioned on Tuesday that this week's negotiations will mark the beginning of a potentially complicated and lengthy process.

Zarif and another senior Iranian negotiator, Abbas Araqchi, said in separate interviews that the Vienna talks will be limited to Iran's nuclear activities, apparently dismissing calls from Israel and the US for Tehran's missile industry to be on the table.

"The criterion for the Vienna talks is the joint plan of action [the interim agreement], and no subject outside that framework could be on the agenda," Araqchi said, according to Iranian media.

Zarif has echoed Araqchi by saying: "As Iran's nuclear program has nothing to do with the military issues, the military issues have nothing to do with the nuclear program either."

As talks began on Tuesday, the EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, chaired a plenary session between Iran and six world powers which was followed by a number of bilaterals, including a meeting between Iran's negotiating team and the US delegation, led by Wendy Sherman, US undersecretary of state for political affairs.

Araqchi said Iran had "good discussions" with the west.

He said: "We are trying to set an agenda. If we can agree on an agenda in the next two to three days, it means we have taken the first step. And we will move forward based on that agenda."

A senior US administration official said negotiations will be "complicated, difficult and lengthy". The official said: "It is probably as likely that we won't get an agreement as it is that we will. But these negotiations are the best chance we have ever had."

The IAEA chief, Yukiya Amano, also met with Zarif in Vienna On Tuesday. Earlier in the week he signalled that one sticking point in the talks was for Iran to sign the IAEA additional protocol which allows unannounced inspections of nuclear or suspect sites.

"The implementation of the Additional Protocol is very important to provide assurance that all nuclear activity in Iran is for a peaceful purpose but we are not yet at that point," he told the news website Breaking Defense on Monday.

Before the talks began, Zarif insisted Iran had the political will to reach a deal.

"We believe we can reach an agreement and we have come here with the political will to reach a final agreement," Zarif said on Monday after meeting the EU foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, for dinner in Vienna.

Meanwhile, Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, made a strongly worded attack on Iran on the eve of the Vienna negotiations – expressing deep scepticism about the outcome of the talks and calling for more pressure to ensure it has neither centrifuges nor the right to enrichment.

Netanyahu told a meeting of US Jewish leaders in Jerusalem: "If Iran perches itself as a threshold state in which it has all the elements of a nuclear weapon in place, they'll just have to do one little twist of the knob to get final enrichment of fissile material that is the core of a nuclear weapon, then all they'll have to do is take these components from one side of a room and another side of a room, put them together and in a very short time, days or weeks or perhaps even hours, they'd have a nuclear weapon."