Putting Iranian nuclear genie back is easier said than done

The US and Iran have held their second round of indirect talks over the latter’s nuclear programme in Rome on Saturday. The US delegation was led by Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and the Iranian by its Foreign Minister Abbas Aragchi and the indirect talks were mediated by Oman.

As in all things related to the Donald Trump Presidency, it is difficult to gauge the outcome of the ongoing negotiations over the former’s nuclear programme. The Iranians have reasons for being wary of dealings with the Trump administration.

Recall that it was Trump who in 2018 peremptorily withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Programme of Action (JCPOA) to check the Iranian nuclear programme that was negotiated by the P-5 (the US, China, France, the UK and Russia) plus Germany. He was also responsible for the 2020 assassination of Iran’s top general, Qassem Soleimani, and had initiated the policy of “maximum pressure" on Iran in his first term.

The two sides will now begin drawing up a framework for a potential nuclear deal. Iran’s Foreign Minister said that the talks had yielded “very good progress." Experts-level meetings will now begin and the top negotiators will meet again on Saturday in Muscat, Oman.

But this does not mean that an agreement is anywhere near. The differences between them are wide and, possibly, even unbridgeable.

In an interview with Fox News last Monday, chief negotiator Steve Witkoff said that the US position was that Iran would have to stop enriching uranium to the level of 20 and 60 per cent and implied that it could be allowed to do so to the level of 3.67 per cent, which is sufficient for civil nuclear energy uses. He also said Iran would have to verify that it does not build ballistic missiles that could deliver nuclear weapons or build nuclear weapon triggers.

However, on Tuesday morning, Witkoff clarified that any final deal would require a complete elimination of the Iranian enrichment and weaponisation programme.

Last Tuesday, Trump convened his top officials and advisers for a meeting to plan for the second round of talks that were held on Saturday.

Trump also spoke on the phone to the Sultan of Oman, Haitham bin Tariq, and discussed the Omani mediation between the two countries. A day earlier, Trump told reporters that Iran needed to move fast and may be stringing the US along with negotiations.

There is substantial debate within the Trump administration on the way forward. One school of thought is backed by Vice-President JD Vance, Special Envoy Steve Witkoff and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, who think that the best path is through negotiations.

They do not want the US to get involved in yet another mid-East conflict and put US soldiers in harm’s way.

While the other school of thought, backed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, wants military strikes, a course of action also being egged on by Israelis. They are skeptical about whether an acceptable deal can be worked out with Iran.

They believe that Iran is extremely weak right now, through a combination of last years’ Israeli strikes and economic strain on account of sanctions and the losses suffered by its regional allies Hezbollah, Hamas and the Assad regime in Syria.

The US-Iran public positions are well known and seemingly irreconcilable. Trump has vowed to prevent Iran from ever getting a nuclear weapon, while Teheran insists that it will never give up the right to nuclear enrichment.

The challenge is to ensure an agreement that will accommodate both views. The US feels that removing all enriched material from Iran and blocking any Iranian capacity to enrich uranium is the way to go.

The Iranians believe that they should be allowed to enrich uranium for their civil nuclear programme.

The devil, of course is in the details. In 2016, when the JCPOA took effect, Iran had a stockpile of less than 300 kg of uranium of 3.67 per cent purity and 5000-odd centrifuges.

Today, eight years after the US trashed the deal, it has nearly 7.5 tonnes of uranium enriched to 60 per cent and 15,000 or so centrifuges. It would take Teheran one or two weeks to produce weapons-grade uranium (enriched to above 90 per cent) to make a bomb and a few months to weaponise it.

Given this, and the lack of complete information on the Iranian programme, the deal would have to have stringent verification provisions to ensure that Iran will never have the capacity to make a bomb.

This could mean dismantling the current capacity and transferring existing enriched uranium stocks out of Iran.

Underlying everything are threats. The US has given Iran a two-month deadline to conclude a deal and it has located B-2 bombers in Diego Garcia and aircraft carriers to the region.

Iran, for its part, has threatened that it will rain destruction on US facilities and allies in the region. The Israelis, for their part, are ever ready to hit the Iranian facilities, but even they acknowledge that they need US help to complete the task. The Iranians, for their part, say that they will devastate facilities of the US and its allies in the Persian Gulf if they are attacked and probably close the Straits of Hormuz to tanker traffic and send oil prices shooting up.

The choices for Iran are stark. There is little doubt that its clandestine nuclear programme is to assure its security against adversaries like Israel and the US, who possess nuclear weapons and have shown a tendency to use hugely disproportionate force against its adversaries in West Asia.

Having suffered over 3,00,000 dead in the war against Iraq in the 1980s, Iran’s predicament is palpable. The challenge is to somehow put the Iranian nuclear genie back in the bottle, which America had itself uncapped.

Manoj Joshi is a Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation.

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