Trump Seeks to Abolish Iran’s Atomic Stockpile, a Problem He Helped Create
President Trump withdrew from the Obama-era nuclear accord in 2018, saying it was the worst deal ever. But Iran responded with an enrichment spree that haunts the negotiations to this day.
By William J. Broad and David E. Sanger
William J. Broad and David E. Sanger have written about the Iranian nuclear program for more than two decades.
As President Trump struggles to negotiate or intimidate his way out of the war he began with Iran, he is confronting the complicated legacy of his decision, eight years ago, to cancel what he has called “a horrible, one-sided deal.”
That Obama-era agreement suffered from flaws and omissions. It would have expired after 15 years, leaving Iran free after 2030 to make as much nuclear fuel as it wanted. But once Mr. Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, the Iranians went on an enrichment spree much sooner, leaving them closer to a bomb than ever before.
Now, Mr. Trump’s negotiators are dealing with the consequences of that decision, which he made over the objections of many of his national security advisers at the time. Underscoring the challenges, Mr. Trump abruptly called off on Saturday a round of nuclear talks with Iran in Pakistan.
Much recent attention has focused on Iran’s half-ton of uranium that has been enriched to a level just shy of what is typically used in atom bombs. The majority of it is thought to be buried in a tunnel complex that Mr. Trump bombed last June. But those 970 pounds of potential bomb fuel represent only a small fraction of the problem.
Today, international inspectors say, Iran has a total of 11 tons of uranium, at various enrichment levels. With further purification, that is enough to build up to 100 nuclear weapons — more than the estimated size of Israel’s arsenal.
Virtually all of that cache accumulated in the years after Mr. Trump abandoned the Obama-era deal. That is because Tehran lived up to its pledge to ship to Russia 12.5 tons of its overall stockpile, about 97 percent. Iran’s weapon designers were left with too little nuclear
