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Q. and A.

The Diplomatic Effort, and What a Final Agreement Might Look Like

President Jimmy Carter and the shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, at a state dinner in Iran in 1977. The United States provided Iran with its first nuclear reactor.Credit...United Press International

VIENNA — Everything about the nuclear negotiations with Iran, now approaching a crucial moment, is complex: the international politics, the implications for the Middle East, and the science of how to prevent a nuclear energy project from turning into a nuclear weapons program. Here are answers to questions about the lead up to the diplomatic effort and what a comprehensive agreement might look like.

Q. How did Iran get started on its nuclear program?

A. With American help. It was the United States that provided Iran with its first small research reactor, provided to the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, when Iran was a strong ally. But after he was exiled to the United States at the start of the Iranian revolution, Iran’s first clerical ruler, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, appeared to have little interest in things atomic.

The program withered until 1985. International Atomic Energy Agency documents later showed that Iran began a uranium-enrichment program. Years later, American intelligence assessments concluded that before 2004, Iran had developed a full-scale weapons program. Iran denies that, saying the documents raising questions about suspected weapons work were fabricated. Intelligence assessments suggest that while Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, halted the most visible elements of the program in late 2003, there has been sporadic work since, in a secret complex of military bases and in universities.

Q. What actions have the international community taken in an effort to halt Iran’s activities?

A. Just about everything, including diplomacy, sanctions and sabotage. A decade ago, the European nations negotiated a full suspension of Iran’s activities, but that ultimately broke down. The Bush administration passed up an opportunity to negotiate a deal when Iran had installed only a few hundred centrifuges, the giant machines that enrich uranium. Many in the Obama administration say that was a lost opportunity. Since then, Iran has installed more than 19,000 centrifuges even as the Obama administration planned aggressive sanctions, aimed chiefly at oil revenue and financial connections to the West. In public, American and European officials credit the sanctions for driving Iran to the negotiating table.

In private, some officials acknowledge significant work to sabotage Iran’s program also has played a role. Defective parts have been slipped into Iran’s supply channel, for example. Scientists and engineers have been assassinated in Tehran, actions widely attributed to Israel. The United States, in partnership with Israel, also started an ambitious cybersabotage effort, code-named Olympic Games, which was the first known American use of cyber weapons against another state. Started by the Bush administration, and accelerated by President Obama, the program sent a series of worms into the computers that run the Natanz enrichment plant, forcing hundreds of centrifuges to break.

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The remains of a car used by an Iranian professor crucial to Iran’s nuclear program, who died in a bombing in Tehran in 2012. Some officials have acknowledged work to sabotage the program.Credit...Mehdi Marizad/Fars News Agency, via Associated Press

Taken together, the sanctions and the sabotage were intended to raise the cost of the nuclear program and to make it clear to Iran that the West would seek to slow any enrichment efforts. The Iranians insist these actions have had the opposite effect, redoubling their determination to have an independent — and they insist, peaceful — enrichment capability. The sanctions and sabotage are often cited by hard-liners in Iran who argue that the United States and Europe cannot be trusted and are seeking to overthrow the government in Iran. If those views prevail in Iran’s internal debates, it could derail any deal.

Q. What is each side hoping to achieve from the negotiations?

A. The Iranians want explicit acknowledgment of their right to make nuclear fuel, and eventually to make as much of it as they desire for peaceful purposes, they say. But they are also seeking an end to the crippling sanctions that have cut their oil revenues by more than half, devalued their currency and made it virtually impossible to conduct normal banking transactions around the world.

For their part, the United States and its negotiating partners — Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China — have said they want a system to cut off all of Iran’s possible pathways to a bomb. That means they want to make sure Iran cannot produce enough uranium to allow it to race for a bomb. And they want an inspection system for Iran that is so comprehensive that the country could not pursue a covert effort to build a weapon in a hidden facility, or to buy one, presumably from North Korea or black market dealers.

The question is whether there is an acceptable middle ground that would allow Iran to declare that the West has acknowledged its right to enrich and left it with a significant capability to do so, while still satisfying the rest of the world that Iran is not on the threshold of a capability to build an atomic weapon.

Q. Many countries have nuclear programs. Why are we worried most about Iran?

A. There are the five declared nuclear weapon states: The United States, Britain, France, Russia and China. Pakistan, India and North Korea have all tested nuclear devices. Though it will not say, Israel is widely known to have an arsenal of more than 100 nuclear weapons. And there are dozens of nonweapon states with advanced nuclear know-how like Japan, with large nuclear stockpiles and lots of scientific expertise, which could make a weapon if it ever decided to.

So what’s the worry about Iran? Israel cites the frequent statements by Iranian leaders declaring that the Jewish state should not exist. The Saudis fear a powerful Shia state, and say that if Iran gets the bomb, they will get one, too. Many other Gulf Arab states would do the same. Those declarations create a concern about a nuclear race that could devolve into an arms race in the Middle East. This is a matter of trust. There are countries the United States does not worry about with nuclear ability and there are countries like Pakistan that everyone worries about. Iran would be in that category.

Q. What are the possible outcomes from negotiations?

A. One possibility is no deal at all, a complete collapse of negotiations that have been going on now for more than a year. But that would not be in anyone’s interest. Congress would most likely impose new sanctions and if the current temporary agreement, reached last year to give some time and space for these negotiations, is allowed to expire, Iran could resume producing a type of fuel that could be rapidly converted for weapons use.

So the most likely outcome is either a final agreement, some kind of muddled agreement in principle with the details to be worked out later or another extension in the talks.

Q. What has to happen in order to reach an agreement?

A. For any agreement to work, there needs to be three deals: One between the West and Iran, one between Mr. Obama and a skeptical Congress and one between the Iranian negotiators and Ayatollah Khamenei. The dynamics of the last two are murky. Mr. Obama wants to suspend sanctions bit by bit, as the Iranians deliver on their part of the deal, meaning Congress might not vote on this for years. That angers many Republicans, and even some Democrats, who say they want a vote. An even bigger mystery: Who makes the final decision in Iran? Presumably, it’s Ayatollah Khamenei’s call, but the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite of Iran’s military, will most likely have a big voice, too.

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An international nuclear inspection team in Iran in January. Iran has denied it has a full-scale nuclear weapons program.Credit...Kazem Ghane/European Pressphoto Agency

Q. What is the calculation for Iran?

A. The Iranians have a fundamental choice to make: Is the nuclear program worth it? Most ordinary Iranians tell pollsters that they support a civilian nuclear program in Iran, and very much want the West to show the kind of respect to the country that it shows to other nations with nuclear technology. And they say Iran has no interest in nuclear weapons, just what Ayatollah Khamenei has said, including a fatwa or legal opinion declaring that the country should never possess them. Iran has a young population, and it yearns for Western travel, Western education and Western respect. An end to sanctions would be a sign of a new era.

But inside the Iranian military, and among the clerics, Iran’s nuclear program is both an insurance policy and a symbol of the nation’s identity as a revolutionary state in a long struggle with the United States and its allies. Iranian leaders have periodically observed that since North Korea tested its nuclear devices, no one has dared push it to the brink. And it did not escape their notice that a decade after Libya gave up its entire nuclear program, its leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, was ousted an then killed by a combination of a national uprising and a European, Arab and American bombing campaign.

In the end, these negotiations are not only about nuclear capability, but also national pride and mutual reassurance. Iran does not want to be treated as an outlier, but rather as a great regional power. The international community needs the confidence that if the Iranians raced for a bomb, it would have plenty of notice and time to react.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: The Diplomatic Effort, and What a Final Agreement Might Look Like. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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