Geneva talks seen as potential breakthrough

While experts here are being deliberately tentative in their assessments of Thursday's meeting in Geneva between Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany (P5+1), there appears to be a growing sense that the results could lay the basis for a long-sought diplomatic breakthrough. Much depends on whether Iran complies with its reported agreement to provide access to inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to its newly disclosed underground uranium-enrichment facility near Qom within two weeks. The director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohammed El-Baradei, is expected in Tehran this weekend to work out the details. But even more promising, according to analysts here, was Iran's agreement in principle to ship most of the enriched uranium it has developed over the last several years at its Natanz facility to Russia and France for processing into fuel for a small reactor that makes isotopes for nuclear medicine.