Twenty-nine of the U.S.' top scientists -- including Nobel laureates, makers of nuclear arms and former White House science advisers -- wrote to President Barack Obama on Saturday to praise the Iran deal, calling it innovative and stringent.
The letter, from some of the world's most knowledgeable experts in the fields of nuclear weapons and arms control, arrives as Obama is lobbying Congress, the U.S. public and the nation's allies to support the agreement.
The two-page letter gives the White House's arguments a boost after the blow Obama suffered Thursday when Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., one of the most influential Jewish voices in Congress, announced he would oppose the deal, which calls for Iran to curb its nuclear program and allow inspections in return for an end to international oil and financial sanctions.
Republican leaders in the House and Senate have promised a vote in mid-September on a resolution to disapprove the nuclear accord between Iran and the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China.
But to scuttle the deal, they need 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a possible filibuster by accord supporters. The president has promised that if a resolution of disapproval is adopted, he will veto it. Then opponents of the deal must secure two-thirds of the lawmakers in both chambers to override the veto.
The first signature on the letter is from Richard Garwin, a physicist who helped design the world's first hydrogen bomb and who has long advised Washington on nuclear weapons and arms control. He is among the last living physicists who helped usher in the nuclear age.
Also signing was Siegfried Hecker, a Stanford professor who from 1986 to 1997 directed the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico, the birthplace of the bomb. The facility produced designs for most of the arms now in the nation's nuclear arsenal.
Other prominent signatories include Freeman Dyson of Princeton, Sidney Drell of Stanford and Rush Holt, a physicist and former member of Congress who now leads the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest general scientific society.
Most of the 29 who signed the letter are physicists, and many of them have held what the government calls Q clearances -- granting access to a special category of secret information on the design of nuclear arms and that is considered equivalent to the military's top secret security clearance.
Many of them have advised Congress, the White House or federal agencies. One of them, Frank von Hippel, a Princeton physicist, served as assistant director for national security in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the administration of President Bill Clinton.
The five Nobel laureates who signed are Leon Cooper of Brown University; Sheldon Glashow of Boston University; David Gross of the University of California, Santa Barbara; Burton Richter of Stanford; and Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The letter uses the words "innovative" and "stringent" more than a half-dozen times, saying, for instance, that the Iran accord has "more stringent constraints than any previously negotiated nonproliferation framework."
"We congratulate you and your team," the letter says in its opening to Obama, adding that the Iran deal "will advance the cause of peace and security in the Middle East and can serve as a guidepost for future nonproliferation agreements."
In a technical judgment that was more ominous than some other assessments of Tehran's nuclear capability, the letter says that Iran, before curbing its nuclear program during the long negotiations, was "only a few weeks" away from having fuel for nuclear weapons.
The letter praises the technical features of the Iran accord and offers tacit rebuttals to recent criticisms on such issues as verification and provisions for investigating what specialists see as evidence of Iran's past research on nuclear arms.
It also focuses on whether Iran could use the accord as diplomatic cover to pursue nuclear weapons in secret.
The deal's plan for resolving disputes, the letter says, greatly mitigates "concerns about clandestine activities." The letter hails the 24-day cap on Iranian delays to site investigations as "unprecedented," adding that the agreement "will allow effective challenge inspection for the suspected activities of greatest concern."
It also welcomes as without precedent the deal's explicit banning of research on nuclear weapons "rather than only their manufacture," as established in the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, the top arms-control agreement of the nuclear age.
The letter notes criticism that the Iran accord, after 10 years, will let Tehran potentially develop nuclear arms without constraint.
"In contrast," it says, "we find that the deal includes important long-term verification procedures that last until 2040, and others that last indefinitely."
Obama interview
In an interview with CNN set to air today, Obama said that resolving the Iranian nuclear issue makes it possible to open broader talks with Iran on other issues and that a constructive relationship with Iran could be a byproduct of the deal to limit its nuclear program. But he said it won't happen immediately, if at all.
"Is there the possibility that having begun conversations around this narrow issue that you start getting some broader discussions about Syria, for example, and the ability of all the parties involved to try to arrive at a political transition that keeps the country intact and does not further fuel the growth of ISIL and other terrorist organizations? I think that's possible," Obama said, referring to the Islamic State group by one of its acronyms. "But I don't think it happens immediately."
Obama was interviewed by CNN's Fareed Zakaria on Thursday.
The interview is set to air as Obama vacations on the Massachusetts island of Martha's Vineyard.
He is not expected to spend much, if any, time reaching out to lawmakers on the Iran nuclear deal while he is away from Washington, according to White House press secretary Josh Earnest.
In the interview, Obama did not answer directly when asked whether he would have to use military force to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon if the deal fell through.
"I have a general policy on big issues like this not to anticipate failure," Obama said. "And I'm not going to anticipate failure now because I think we have the better argument."
Iranian general backs deal
Also on Saturday, Iran's military chief backed the nuclear deal despite having concerns about it, the official IRNA news agency reported, a major endorsement that could allow conservatives to back an accord that hard-liners oppose.
Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi, the chief of staff of Iran's armed forces and a close ally of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, spoke of 16 advantages of the deal in comments published by the news agency. While acknowledging the military's concerns, Firouzabadi wrote that both a recent United Nations vote on the deal and the accord itself "have advantages that critics have ignored."
Khamenei, who has the final say on all state matters, has not publicly approved or disapproved the deal reached last month. However, he repeatedly has offered words of support for his country's nuclear negotiators.
Iran's parliament and the Supreme National Security Council, the country's highest security decision-making body, are to consider the agreement in the coming days.
Hard-liners have accused moderate President Hassan Rouhani and the country's nuclear negotiators of giving too many concessions in return for too little.
Meanwhile Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif rejected a report by the Institute for Science and International Security, a U.S. nonprofit, that claimed satellite imagery showing crates, trucks and construction may be linked to a renewed attempt to clean up Iran's Parchin military complex before an inspection by the U.N.'s nuclear monitor. Zarif said work at Parchin was for a "road-building project" and called the report's allegations "baseless," according to comments published by IRNA.
Information for this article was contributed by William J. Broad and staff members of The New York Times and by Ali Akbar Dareini of The Associated Press.
A Section on 08/09/2015