Excerpt
Hari Sreenivasan (Newshour): Joining us now from Geneva, Switzerland is the NewsHour’s chief foreign correspondent Margaret Warner. She has been reporting on the story all week. So, it's somewhat complicated, Margaret, but break it down for us. Which sides get what?
Margaret Warner (Newshour): Well, Hari, in the days of painstaking negotiations in the Intercontinental Hotel right behind me, Iran and the U.S. both got the most important thing they needed. For the U.S., the U.S. needed to stop the clock on the advancing of Iran's nuclear program because it's believed to be within three to six months of being nuclear weapons capable. Not the same as having a bomb, but nuclear weapons capable.
And so the fear, the concern was that even during negotiations on a really comprehensive agreement to stop it all, that Iran would achieve that state and then President Obama would have a very unpleasant choice of military action, or letting it happen, or watching Israel launch a military strike.
So, they got a freezing - I’ll just give a few examples of the programs that-- of all of the reactors we've heard a lot about: Fordone, Natanz and the Arak plutonium reactor. Iran promised not to build any more centrifuges and not even operate thousands that they have installed that aren't operational. And they agreed to no longer enrich to 20% which was weapons grade and to reduce and ultimately eliminate that stockpile.
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