When Did This War Really Start? When Trump Blew Up Obama’s Iran Deal
The Pentagon last week ordered the 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East, and thousands of them have since arrived. One of the missions this elite unit could undertake would be to attempt to retrieve 440 kilograms (a thousand pounds) of highly enriched uranium stored deep underground at Iran’s Isfahan nuclear site.
Many will likely die in this attempt. But they would not have to undertake this high-risk, low-probability of success mission if President Trump had not pulled out of the Iran Nuclear Deal in 2018. If that deal were still in effect, Iran would not have the uranium gas or the advanced centrifuges needed to turn it into the core of 10 bombs. Not even close.
To make the material for fuel or bombs, a country has to mix refined uranium (often called yellowcake because of its color and consistency) with fluorine gas to create uranium hexafluoride (UF6). Iran does that at the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan. (I have visited that facility.) The gas is then sent to centrifuge plants where it is spun around at high speeds to increase the percentage of Uranium-235 atoms in the gas. Natural uranium has less than 1 percent of this isotope.
The same centrifuges that can enrich the gas to low levels for fuel rods for civilian power reactors (3.67 percent) can be used to enrich it to high levels for the cores of weapons (90 percent). Same machines, same facilities. The output is determined by several factors, including the amount of gas, the enrichment level of the gas, the number of centrifuges, and the quality of the centrifuges.
This is the core of the problem with Iran. Since the late 1990s, Iran’s leaders have said that they do not want nuclear weapons but seek only to have a secure source of nuclear fuel for the reactors they want to build. Of course, we don’t trust them. Ideally, Iran would surrender all of its enrichment capabilities. But they won’t.
There are only two solutions to this problem. The first is war. Destroy all the centrifuges and other production sites. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is correct that he has been urging war on Iran since he warned as a young member of the Knesset in 1992 that Iran could make a bomb “within three to five years.” No U.S. president until now has ever ordered such a war because of the obvious risk of catastrophic consequences.
The other alternative is negotiations. The great tragedy of U.S.-Iran relations is that when one nation was willing to negotiate, the other was not. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, for example, Iran offered to negotiate its then-tiny nuclear program, it relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia, and more. But the U.S. refused. Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly said, “We don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it.” In 2009, President Barack Obama was willing to open talks, but was rebuffed by Iran’s hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But finally, in 2013, the stars aligned. In June of that year, Iranians elected a reformist president, Hassan Rouhani, who was ready to talk to Obama. That November, the United States and its partners (Germany, the United Kingdom, the European Union, Russia, and China) struck an interim agreement with Iran, finalized in a 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), popularly known as the Iran Deal.
The deal was perhaps the strongest non-proliferation agreement ever negotiated. It solved the problem. The restrictions in the deal prevented Iran from getting anywhere near the production of highly enriched uranium or plutonium (the other element used in the cores of bombs). It blocked all of Iran’s pathways to a bomb for 15 to 25 years.
It did this by limiting every part of the enrichment equation. Iran could not enrich any uranium over the very low levels needed for fuel. The deal officially took effect in January 2016, so those restrictions would still have been in place today. Most would not have expired until January 2031.
The deal forced Iran to rip out most of its 19,000 centrifuges and allowed it to operate only 5,000. It also limited Iran to operating only its very basic centrifuges, the IR-1, and prevented it from using any advanced centrifuges that could enrich uranium much faster. Those limits would have started to expire in 2026, but Iran would not have installed many, if any, newer centrifuges by now. By contrast, Iran waited a year after Trump pulled out of the agreement, then began installing advanced centrifuges, totaling almost 22,000 of all types by last year.
Even with better centrifuges, under the deal Iran would not have the gas needed to feed them. It prohibited Iran from having any uranium gas over the 3.67 percent level until 2031 at the earliest. It takes only a few weeks to spin 60 percent uranium to weapons-grade; it takes months to do the same with low-enriched gas. It was also limited to storing only 300 kg of that low-level gas. It was a token amount, useless for much of anything. The deal also forced Iran to pull out the core of its Arak reactor (which some feared could be used to make plutonium), drill it full of holes and fill it with concrete.
Further, while many of the limits expired after 15, 20, or 25 years, many were like diamonds—they lasted forever.
These included a permanent, sophisticated inspection regime that ensured we could track Iran’s uranium from the time it came out of its mines until it was turned into fuel rods. It included a permanent ban on Iran ever building a nuclear weapon. It included a permanent ban on Iran building a reprocessing facility that could extract plutonium from spent fuel.
All of this meant that even if Iran broke out of the deal, it would take it at least a year to make enough highly enriched uranium for a bomb, and perhaps another year to turn that into a weapon. And we would see them doing it.
The hope was that while these limits were in place, the U.S. and its partners could coax Iran back to the table to negotiate other agreements to address Iran’s ballistic missile program, its aid for regional militias, and a follow-on agreement that would ensure Iran could never build a bomb.
This is why the overwhelming majority of national security experts and officials in the world supported the deal. Fifty of them signed a letter in April 2014 endorsing the deal, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; former National Security Advisors Samuel Berger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Brent Scowcroft; retired Generals Anthony Zinni and Frank Kearney; retired Admirals William Fallon, Eric Olsen, and Joe Sestak, among others. There were many other letters, signed by hundreds of seasoned professionals.
These experienced national security experts were not fools. They were not duped by Iran. They understood that this was a solid agreement, one that stopped Iran from getting a bomb and stopped a new, unnecessary war in the Middle East. It is why MS NOW host Rachel Maddow said when the deal was finalized in July 2015 that it was “the major foreign policy achievement, not only of [Obama’s] presidency, but of this American generation.” That is correct. It was the most important security agreement of this century.
Trump threw it away. He promised a “bigger, better deal” that he never delivered. This set us on the path to war.
It is next to impossible for the U.S. or Israel to retrieve the 60 percent enriched uranium and the advanced centrifuges Iran made after Trump pulled out of the deal. If the gas is intact, and if even a few hundred centrifuges are operating, Iran could turn that gas into the material for the cores needed for 10 bombs in a few weeks. U.S. intelligence estimates that Iran could then construct deliverable weapons in a year or less.
So in other words: When Trump and his people try to scare Americans about Iran being close to having a nuclear weapon, to the extent that’s true, it’s true only because of Trump’s actions! Whereas if Trump has left Obama’s agreement in place, Iran would not have those centrifuges today. It would not have that uranium gas today. We would not be at war. No one needed to die, and no economies needed to suffer, save for Trump’s folly.