Vienna/Washington, July 14 Iran and six world powers on Tuesday thrashed out a historic agreement that curbs Tehran's nuclear programme in exchange for lifting over a decade-long economic sanctions.
The comprehensive agreement was clinched between Iran and P5+1 - Britain, China, France, Russia and the US plus Germany -- after torturous talks in the Austrian capital.
Under the deal, Iran would ship most of its nuclear stockpile to Russia, blocking the technical path to a nuclear bomb, Xinhua qouted a source as saying.
The deal would specify that the related UN resolutions on economic and financial sanctions against Iran will be terminated all at once under a UN resolution and in an agreed framework, Iranian media reported.
The deal's text, which runs into around 100 pages, specifies key areas of the Iranian nuclear issue, including nuclear technology cooperation, capping its nuclear capacity and draft of UN Security Council resolution.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu slammed the development. "The deal is a bad mistake of historic proportions," Xinhua quoted him as saying.
"When you are willing to have an agreement at any price, this is the result... In all fields, in which they (P5+1) were supposed to prevent Iran from arming itself with nuclear weapons, far-reaching concessions were made," Netanyahu said.
The deal is a high point of US President Barack Obama's foreign policy.
"Today, after two years of negotiation, the US together with the international community has achieved something that decades of animosity has not: a comprehensive long-term deal with Iran that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon," Obama said from the White House.
"Every pathway to a nuclear weapon is cut off," CNN quoted Obama as saying. He said the deal provides for extensive inspections. "This deal is not built on trust. It is built on verification."
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif described the deal as "a historic moment".
But he quickly added: "We are reaching an agreement that is not perfect for anybody but it is what we could accomplish and it is an important achievement for all of us."
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani confirmed the deal on Twitter, saying it "shows constructive engagement works".
After Rouhani took office in 2013, Tehran and the six countries stepped up the nuclear talks and signed a deal in Geneva in November 2013, under which Tehran would suspend some disputed nuclear activities in exchange for limited sanction relief from the West, buying time for diplomatic efforts.
In the past 18 months, marathon negotiations between Iran and P5+1 have resolved many tough issues which were once seen as impossible.
Iran has said its nuclear programme was for peaceful purposes. The West feared it could be used to build an atomic bomb.
Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), explained that he had signed a roadmap with Iran to clarify past and present outstanding issues.
"I have just signed the roadmap between Iran and the IAEA for the clarification of past and present outstanding issues regarding Iran's nuclear programme," he said.
Future access to Iran's Parchin military site, which was repeatedly sought, was part of a separate "arrangement", Amano added.
The deal is meant to impose long-term, verifiable limits on nuclear programmes that Tehran could modify to produce weapons. Iran, in return, would get tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief.
