The talks between the E3+3 group and Iran are going to take place at a villa on the edge of Geneva, and the press will be penned in a hotel some distance away. If the last such meeting, in July 2008, is anything to go by, it will kick off with a long speech by Iran's nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili. Last year, he spoke for over two hours about the state of the world, but not about Iran's nuclear programme. The open question this time is whether Jalili will make a similar speech and leave, or hang around to answer questions on the nuclear programme in the afternoon.
European diplomats are setting the bar for success very low - an agreement to meet in the next few weeks to talk specifically about Iran's nuclear file would do - but its unclear whether Iran has any intention of jumping over it.
Meanwhile on the eve of the meeting, British intelligence has openly broken from the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that said that Iran had probably stopped working on weaponisation in 2003. British officials had long poured scorn on the NIE in private. Today, security officials confirmed to our security editor, Richard Norton-Taylor that they believe that even if there was a pause in 2003, work on building a warhead restarted in late 2004 or early 2005. This was first reported this morning in the FT. The German BND has also publicly broken with the NIE, in its evidence to a federal appeals court in a smuggling case.
However, ElBaradei told CNN he has seen no "credible evidence" that Iran has an ongoing weapons programme "today". It will be interesting to see how that squares with an internal memorandum by IAEA weapons experts, some of which has been leaked and more of which is likely to come out in the next few days.
Meanwhile, for the technically-minded, there is a bit of a debate underway about the Qom enrichment plant. ISIS has published a new DigitalGlobe image of the site from September 27 this year
Compare this with an image eight months earlier
And a GoogleEarth picture from 2005
Intelligence briefers say the pictures show tunnelling work, with the structures apparent in 2005 described as covered tunnel entrances which were later removed. This is ISIS's analysis, too.
Geoffrey Forden at Arms Control Wonk, however, says that the buildings are halls for centrifuge cascades that have been built into the mountainside and then covered.