The Guardian has the story Iran nuclear negotiations at crucial juncture over Arak reactor.

The fate of Iran’s heavy-water reactor has become a sticking point in high-level nuclear negotiations in Geneva, according to the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius.

The Iranian delegation is believed to have presented western powers with a draft text of an agreement on Friday, which is now the focus of the negotiation. But Fabius told France Inter radio on Saturday that Paris would not accept a “sucker’s deal”. He said: “As I speak to you, I cannot say there is any certainty that we can conclude.”

I knew the above was why France blocked the deal.  However, I wanted to record the rebuttal of the French position.  Maybe I had seen the rebuttal before, but I was having a bit of a struggle finding it.  This article provides the following:

Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, in Washington, argued that the heavy-water plant at Arak should not be an obstacle to achieving a stop-gap deal to defuse tensions.

Kimball said construction work “is more than a year from being completed; it would have to be fully operational for a year to produce spent fuel that could be used to extract plutonium. Iran does not have a reprocessing plant for plutonium separation and Arak would be under IAEA safeguards the whole time.

“Arak represents a long-term proliferation risk not a near-term risk and it can be addressed in the final phase of negotiations. France and the other … powers would be making a mistake if they hold up an interim deal that addresses more urgent proliferation risks over the final arrangements regarding Arak.”

With the above information firmly in hand, we can move on to the conjectures as to why France is behaving this way.

The Real News Network has the video Why Did France Thwart The Iran nuclear deal?

Robert Parry speculates:

And what happened to some degree over the summer was that Prince Bandar and other Saudi officials began trolling through Europe, trying to figure out if they could pull away some of the countries of Europe in favor of the Saudi position, and essentially the Israeli position, on issues like Syria and Iran. They seem to have had great success with the French, who, of course, have a serious economic problem. They have been struggling trying to get out of this recession. They’ve had a recent credit downgrade. They’ve had high unemployment. And so when the Saudis began to flash some of their petrodollars around, it was certainly something of interest to the French. And the Saudis have recently been signing up contracts with the French for military assistance. There’s a one-and-a-half billion dollar plan for the French to help refurbish some of the Saudi Navy. And you’ve had other Gulf states making other deals with France in terms of buying their equipment, especially their military equipment. So what you’ve got here is the French having a very clear economic incentive to help the Saudis and the Israelis as much as possible.

Perhaps being armed with this “information” we will be able to fight off the warmongers in our Congress that would rather fight than switch.