GENEVA
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian counterpart Javad Zarif will meet in Geneva on Jan. 14 ahead of a new round of nuclear talks.
Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif said on Tuesday that U.S. and Iranian delegations will hold bilateral talks on Jan. 15-17.
Iran will also have negotiations with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - the U.S., U.K., China, France and Russia, also known as the P5+1 group - ahead of multilateral talks on Jan. 18, he added.
Both sides have already missed two deadlines for a permanent settlement on Iran's nuclear program.
Negotiations in the Austrian capital, Vienna, on Nov. 24, 2014 were supposed to be the final round of talks between Iran and the group of world powers.
Fears over Israeli nukes
However, the deadline for a permanent settlement with Iran was extended till the end of June 2015.
The P5+1 group claim Iran could be seeking to develop nuclear weapons and want it to curb its nuclear program in return for the lifting of sanctions, despite the fact a declassified summary of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate found in 2007 with "high confidence" that the Islamic republic had stopped efforts to develop nuclear weapons in late 2003.
The U.S. intelligence report, which represented the consensus of the U.S.' intelligence agencies, also stated at the time Tehran was also unlikely to be able to produce enough enriched uranium for a bomb for years in the event of restarting any program toward building nuclear arms.
The U.S. and John Kerry have also been criticized for the hardline approach to Iran over its nuclear program, with critics pointing out nothing is said by Washington about Israel's arsenal of nuclear weapons, believed to number in the hundreds.
Arab League Chief Amr Moussa said in 2009 that Israel's nuclear program was "more worrying than Iran's".
