The Just Security Podcast

Is There a Diplomatic Path for Iran’s Nuclear Program? An Interview with Richard Nephew

• Just Security • Season 1 • Episode 113

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Iran’s nuclear program has long been a source of international tension. Early in U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, hopes for a diplomatic resolution resurfaced—until June, when Israel launched strikes on Iranian nuclear and military sites. Days later, the United States joined the conflict, bombing three sites within Iran. Iran retaliated with missile attacks in Israel and a U.S. base in Qatar, and suspended cooperation with nuclear inspectors.

With both Washington and Tehran signaling interest in returning to talks despite the violence, what are the prospects for diplomacy now? To discuss where things stand and what a path forward might look like, Just Security’s co-editor-in-chief Tess Bridgeman is joined by Richard Nephew, a leading expert on Iran’s nuclear program and former Deputy Special Envoy for Iran.

Show Notes: 

Tess Bridgeman: This is the Just Security Podcast. I'm your host, Co-Editor-in-Chief Tess Bridgeman. Iran's nuclear program has been a flashpoint for international tensions for decades. Over the past several years, Iran has been ramping up its nuclear activities after President Trump in 2018 withdrew the United States from the landmark diplomatic arrangement reached during the Obama administration, despite all sides verifiably abiding by their commitments. 

Renewed diplomatic efforts stalled under the Biden administration, but as his second term got underway, President Trump showed strong interest in a diplomatic resolution. Talks were underway when on June 13, Israel acted on a plan reportedly conceived many months before, and began striking Iran's nuclear and military infrastructure, among other targets, killing over 900 Iranians. 

President Trump brought the United States into the conflict on June 21, launching strikes against three Iranian nuclear sites. Iran responded with missile barrages against Israel and a U.S. base in Qatar and its parliament later ordered a suspension of cooperation with nuclear inspectors. Major questions loom about the legality of the strikes and the lack of intelligence pointing to an imminent attack stemming from Iran's nuclear program. 

Despite all of this, the U.S. and Iran have both expressed a willingness to return to the negotiating table. What were the prospects for a diplomatic resolution before the recent conflict, and how have those prospects changed? Is there still a path forward for diplomacy, and what would it entail? Joining us to discuss where we go from here is leading expert and my friend and former colleague, Richard Nephew. Richard is the Bernstein Adjunct Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and is a senior research scholar at Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy. Among other previous roles in government, Richard has served as the Deputy Special Envoy for Iran, as Principal Deputy Coordinator for Sanctions Policy at the Department of State, and as director for Iran at the National Security Council.

Welcome, Richard. It is so good to have you here today. Thank you for joining us. I can think of no better person to be having this conversation with, even though I wish we were having a different conversation about the way forward on Iran's nuclear program. But I thought we could jump right in and get started with kind of setting the stage for folks of where we were before the 12-day war caught the world's attention. So, if you could set the stage a little bit in terms of both where we were on Iran's nuclear program itself, the status of its enrichment capabilities, et cetera, but also where we were on the status of trying to achieve a resolution? That would be really helpful background for our listeners. 

Richard Nephew: Yeah, no. Great. Happy to do it. And thanks very much for having me. Really, really appreciate being with you. So, look, you know, I think the nuclear program was in a potentially pretty dangerous spot. You know, part of the reason why the Trump administration was interested in getting diplomacy going was because of the status of significant parts of the nuclear program and questions about those bits that we weren't, you know, completely understanding. 

So, you know, look, we knew that the Iranians had acquired a pretty significant stockpile of highly enriched uranium, primarily enriched to 60 percent, although they also had some enriched uranium at 20 percent, lower levels too. And you know, the upshot is that with that amount of enriched uranium, they had enough on hand that they could have produced, you know, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of nine to 10 nuclear weapons. So that's not a great situation. 

Worse, because of the installed centrifuge capacity that they had, both at Natanz and at Fordow, it was assessed that they could potentially move that direction five to six days for their first nuclear weapons worth of material. Gotta be clear, that doesn't mean they have a nuclear weapon at five to six days. But, you know, it's also not a great place to be in if five to six days from now, they've got their first bombs worth of HU and potentially could take it someplace else to turn into weapons components.

So, you know, from the nuclear program status, they had a large number of advanced centrifuges installed. They had a large amount of highly enriched uranium. They were doing all this work at various different facilities throughout the country. And then, you know, there was the outstanding question about what they were doing with the weapons. You know, there have been reports going back for a couple of years now that the Iranians have been playing around with some weaponization-relevant technology, and you know, some things that would potentially give them the ability to move to weapons relatively quickly. Nothing that would constitute a smoking gun, but enough that that people sitting around will look around and saying, okay, they've got the material, they potentially have some weapons worth, and then they've got strategic rationale. So, none of that looks terribly good. 

Tess: And if you can take us further back in time now to the file that we worked on together, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, because the situation looked very different, of course, during the timeframe when first we had the freeze for freeze, an interim, deal, right, then in the 2014 timeframe, then in 2015 when the JCPOA was reached. Tight limits were put on the program. And just to contrast the numbers you were just throwing out, right, the enrichment limit was 3.67 percent, if I recall? You know, everything was either down, blended or shipped out of the country. The plutonium pathway was cut off by pouring concrete into the reactor. We had the most intense inspections and monitoring regime ever negotiated for any nuclear program.

And that last bit is the one that, I think also, in addition to the level of enrichment, you just mentioned the possibility of some, you know, early flirtations with weaponization work, that last piece of monitoring is one that really was worrying folks that stay up at night thinking about Iran's nuclear program. Can you give us a brief wave top of where we were on access by the IAEA, which is the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. watchdog responsible for monitoring nuclear facilities?

Richard: Yeah. I mean, just as you say, I mean the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action had really put the Iranian nuclear program on ice for all intents and purposes, at least that part of the program that could potentially contribute to weapons. So, like I said, we heavily restricted the number of centrifuges that could operate. Importantly, they were forced to use the old machines, not the new ones, you know? So, the R&D program was also put on ice. And when you have a smaller number of older machines that, combined with the limitations on material, automatically meant that you had a much longer breakout timeframe, and one that's a lot more uncertain, right? You know, when I say five to six days, that's probably a conservative estimate. You know, back under the JCPOA, we had a year, and that's a year to the first bombs worth of nuclear material. You know, not talking about nine or 10.  

Tess: That all starts spinning at maximum speed the day they break from the deal, right?

Richard: Exactly. The go moment between, you know, when they start and when they get to first bombs worth a year, as opposed to, you know, five to six days. So, I mean, there really is no comparison between the two, and that limitation on advanced centrifuges not only has an impact on breakout time, as a breakout on clandestine program time, right? So, you know, there's always been a worry that the Iranians have got clandestine centrifuges and a clandestine uranium enrichment program. But, you know, it's not great if they're doing it with older machines, but it's really much worse if they're doing it with centrifuges that are five to six times better than the machines that they were running at the time of the JCPOA. 

Look, as you said, I mean, you know, all the other pathways to nuclear weapons were closed off by the JCPOA. You know, the Arak reactor, for folks who are trying to not get their countries and reactors confused, you know, that was, you know, essentially, you know, taken offline. It wasn't going to be a plutonium production reactor anytime soon. And that's part of the reason why we can say today, our big problem this is HU, not plutonium. It's because of the work of the JCPOA, which, even if it's not in effect at this point, is still giving us those sorts of benefits. 

And then, as you said, I mean, you know, the JCPOA also gave us, you know, incredible transparency into the Iranian nuclear program. So, we had standard IAEA access. Then we had advanced reactor access through the additional protocol, which is essentially provides additional authorities for IAEA inspectors to take a look at stuff, additional declarations. And then, even beyond that, we had additional technology, including machines that are actually monitoring material, going through centrifuges, being able to say exactly what's in there, and the ability of the IAEA to have much more constant access to the centrifuge halls. That all adds up to a much stronger sense that we knew what was going on inside of the program, and that we had a pretty good sense if the Iranians were going to, you know, turn to some kind of weapons breakout. 

And, you know, I think on top of all that, we had the fact that we had a deal in place, and we had a set of mechanisms to resolve any disputes. And it's just notable to me that, you know, we don't have one of those now, and instead, you have to negotiate something completely different, that you know you don't have any kind of structure to address.

Tess: So, now we come forward to, I guess — first, let's pause in 2018, when Trump withdraws from the deal during his first administration, and for a while, Iran keeps complying, perhaps in the hopes that the international scene would change. But, you know, over time, it begins walking back from its nuclear commitments, sort of one at a time, at first, and then kind of in broader ways, later. And the Biden administration failed to get back into the JCPOA right at the start, and then over the next four years, was not able to get a follow on, a successor. There were lots of different ideas floated, but it wasn't able to get back into a multilateral arrangement that was going to work for lots of reasons that we don't need to get into now. 

Suffice it to say, Trump inherited a situation that was pretty bad on the nuclear front.

Richard: Yeah.

Tess: Because of his own doing, to be clear, but it had gotten worse, and was nevertheless interested, finally, in making a deal, as he is sometimes wont to do. He seemed to be in favor of, you know, claiming credit for having resolved the Iranian nuclear problem that he created. So, you know, make of that what you will, there was the possibility for diplomacy. So, what might that have looked like before the June 13 bombing campaign by Israel began? Where could we have gone in terms of a diplomatic solution? 

Richard: Yeah, I mean, so it probably wasn't the JCPOA, just to kind of put that one to the rest. You know, frankly, the JCPOA’s technical value had been eroded by the steps the Iranians had taken, you know, starting, like you said, in 2018 and continuing and intensifying, really, in 2019. And everything from, you know, the work that they did to produce, you know, HU, yeah, you could potentially down-let that, but that's a little bit of an issue. You know, some of the new sites they created, okay, that's kind of a problem. 

But the big problem was the advances in the centrifuge, right? So, you know, if there's one thing that we absolutely lost, categorically cannot be denied, is the constraint on Iran centrifuge capabilities, and the ability to hold them back to those older machines, hold their production back to the older machines. And, oh, by the way, the ability to account for centrifuge components, which is one of the things that we lost in 2021 when the Iranians decided no longer to allow any kind of IAEA access to the centrifuge component workshops, or to allow any kind of stockpile analysis to be done by the IAEA. And the Iranians did this — in part they were responding to attacks that had been made on the centrifuge component workshops, and you could understand why they would try and protect those facilities. Frankly, it might have also been that they saw an opportunity to be able to start stockpiling centrifuges too.  

But the upshot is that, you know, you lost a lot of things that we'd had with the JCPOA. That's not where we were going back to when Trump got into office. And I think what we were probably looking for is a deal that would give us a little bit of time and space, potentially, to lead to something that was a little bit more long term. And I think that's a little bit where the Trump administration was getting to towards the end of the process, not at the beginning. The beginning, you know, Trump and Witkoff were really talking a big game about how they didn't see a need for big, long deals and lots of texts and things like that. They thought that was for, you know, people who don't know how to negotiate. We can do this really simply, one sheet of paper, you know, Iran agrees not to have nuclear weapons, as if the NPT didn't do that, and if, if other treaties, you know, potentially couldn't. 

But the upshot is, I think they were trending towards some kind of deal that would have walked everyone a step back, you know, potentially provide some limited amount of sanctions relief for the Iranians and have restrictions on Iran's enrichment program, potentially reducing its stockpile of HU, potentially putting some of the international inspections back in place, potentially not having new centrifuges brought online — things to contain this problem until such time as you could, you know, have a longer negotiation on something a little bit more permanent, potentially dealing with regional issues, potentially dealing with missile issues, those sorts of things. 

I think the problem that we immediately ground into a halt with is the issue of enrichment, or whether or not enrichment could continue and run. And the Trump administration took the Israeli position and a position, you know, maintained by some more hardline folks in the United States, that no enrichment in Iran was acceptable. The Iranians maintain their position they've had since 2002 that they will have enrichment in Iran and that they are not going to compromise on it. The principle of it, whether or not they may be willing to make some kind of concession to limits and scope and scale for some period of time, you know, that really being a separate kind of conversation. But, you know, those are where the kind of fault lines were in the discussions and what we didn't see was what the revised proposal, potentially coming from the United States, would have looked like, you know, being extended to the Iranians Sunday after the bombs started falling.

Tess: So that's a great time to start talking about the bombs that started falling. We were on the verge, as you say, of the next round of negotiations due to be held in Amman. So, hard to say diplomatic options were exhausted, but we're going to bracket the international law questions that that begs for a moment and just get back into what actually happened on the ground. So, Israel begins its attacks on June 13. It's launching missiles, using drone strikes as well, against a number of nuclear and military facilities, including assassinating nuclear scientists, including strikes on energy infrastructure and Evin Prison, among other targets. Iran has put the death toll at around 935 killed, including, they report, 38 children and 102 women.

The U.S. joined that bombing campaign after first making clear they were not a part of it, when the campaign initially began. They joined the campaign on June 21, launching strikes against three Iranian nuclear facilities. Iran's immediate response, of course, had been launching missiles at Israel. For its part, Israel claims 24 casualties and damage to over 240 residential buildings, and the immediate response to the U.S. strikes, of course, is the launch of a missile at the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar with advance warning, read as a de-escalatory measure and a ceasefire was indeed announced fairly soon thereafter, along with Iranian resolve that they won't give up enrichment and that, essentially, this thing isn't over.

So, you know, there's been a lot of discussion on whether, in fact, the hostilities phase of this is over, right? Whether Israel and potentially the United States as well, realizing the likely limited success of their strikes, may seek to continue using force instead of trying to get to a diplomatic resolution, whether Iran would then respond with asymmetric capabilities, with cyber-attacks, with maritime disruption, with sleeper cells. There's sort of a parade of horribles that Iran could pull out if backed into a corner, is essentially the view. And all of these kinds of, you know, I think there's been plenty of analysis out there on the limited success of the strikes, including your own excellent writing in Foreign Affairs, Richard, as well as the tactical success of some of the individual strikes, right? They, you know, it is impressive in a military sense what strikes were able to do, even if from a strategic standpoint — and here's my view — that it was, in fact, a misfire and a backfire that has tremendously unstrategic implications. 

So, bringing us to today, where do you think Iran's nuclear program is, before we get into the long-term implications, for can we actually still get a diplomatic resolution, and what does this whole episode portend for the broader nuclear non-proliferation architecture that was the backbone, right, of all attempts to constrain Iran's nuclear program, much as it is the backbone of our, you know, international community's effort to stem nuclear proliferation more broadly? So, that was a compound question, so, where do you think Iran's nuclear program is now after the 12-day war, which may or may not be over, but let's just take stock now as though we're at a pause. 

Richard: Yeah, at a minimum, we're at some kind of punctuation, whether it's a period or a comma, like, we're yet to see. I mean, so look, I think I share your broad sense of the tactical versus the strategic. I think I have the utmost confidence that the U.S. Air Force, working with other services, was able to accomplish the mission that was set before. And I actually don't think a lot of critiques of the operation are hitting that point. I don't think anybody is really questioning whether or not the Air Force did its job. I think everybody thinks the Air Force probably did its job. There are questions as to what happened inside Fordow and frankly, those are questions that just come from no one's got eyes on to see so, I mean, you know, we'll get an answer. 

Tess: I’ll pause you for a minute. Fordow is what? 

Richard: So, Fordow is the deeply buried facility that was built under a mountain. It was revealed publicly by President Obama in 2009. Folks might remember he was at an event in Pittsburgh, I think was a G20 event. He went out with the British and the French actually, and revealed the existence of this facility. It basically was constructed to be a 3,000-centrifuge facility under a mountain, deeply buried, hardened, very difficult to target. 3,000 is a relevant number because of the original centrifuge type. 3,000 basically adds up to an independent ability to produce your first nuclear weapons working material in one year. So, if you bring in natural uranium, in the uranium gas format, but you bring it in, and you start off with natural no enrichment whatsoever. At the end of the year, you have a weapons worth of material. That's the format that 3,000 centrifuges of that type can potentially provide you. 

Obviously, if you have more advanced centrifuges, those timelines shrink. Obviously, if you bring in more enriched uranium, those timelines shrink. And in fact, that is what happened after 2018, you know, with the Iranians producing 60 percent enriched uranium there. So, the facility itself was constructed to be both a backup plan in case the Natanz facility was ever destroyed, which it was, in fact. I’ll come back to that a minute, and as well as potentially a clandestine weapons, you know, project facility. Now, that ability to operate clandestinely was spoiled when Obama put it out public, but still, that was the original intent. 

Tess: Great, okay, so Fordow is one of the targets. And, yeah, just go ahead and talk us through.

Richard: I’ll walk you through the rest. Yeah, so, you know, the Air Force, you know, dropped multiple mops on the facility, 12 in total, and almost certainly, you know, damaged and made inoperable centrifuges that were located there. The Air Force, at the same time, also attacked the Natanz facility and the Isfahan facility. Actually, the Isfahan slew was targeted by cruise missiles coming from the Navy. But the upshot was that between the U.S. and Israeli operations, all of the declared parts of Iran's nuclear program that potentially could have contributed to weapons were badly damaged and hit with some kind of military operations. The only things that the U.S. and Israel did not target were Bushehr and the Tehran Nuclear Research Center, which also has an operating reactor, a research reactor. But those two facilities were not targeted. Basically everything else at some point or another received some amount of targeting, U.S. or Israel, and that includes laboratory workshops where the Iranians could have been doing a nuclear weaponization-related work.

But now we come to the what do we not get and, or, at least where we got questions. So, we can be reasonably confident that the centrifuges at Natanz and centrifuges at Fordow were badly damaged if not destroyed, in no small part, just simply because of vibrations and power fluctuations, tend to crash center made. You should think about these — if you're ever really thought about a centrifuge, think about something spinning as fast as anything possibly can spin, and then you cut the juice. And when you do that, things break. It's just a simple reality. The physics that are associated with trying to slow things down when power interrupts. So even if you didn't have external vibration, similar explosions, you're going to lose a bunch of stuff. 

But what we don't know was destroyed at Natanz or at Fordow is the enriched uranium that the Iranians had there. So, when you take uranium, you run it through the centrifuges, it basically is collected in gas cylinders that look an awful lot like a hot water heater, just to visualize it. And so, when you have one of these hot water heaters, you can potentially then pick them up and move them into a storage location which can be a lot less sensitive to damage. And certainly, if you don't have operating centrifuges, less sensitive damage there too. On top of that, the Iranians had some of this enriched uranium in tunnels at a place I already mentioned. And you know, the tunnels there were actually constructed to be a protected storage site for enriched uranium. 

So, all this is to come back to the status of the program. You have to first start with what is the status of Iran’s uranium that they have enriched up to 60 percent? And we don't know. We can reasonably expect that uranium that was inside centrifuges may have leaked, but uranium that was in these cylinders is potentially totally accessible to the Iranians, provided that you can either dig it out of Fordow, dig it out of Natanz, or retrieve it from Isfahan. And that's what we're already starting to see bulldozers doing. 

Tess: Yeah, as you've said, they have bulldozers. Modern construction equipment exists in Iran. So, there's some amount of an enriched uranium stockpile, likely intact, likely needing to be dug out of the ground in one of these locations. 

Richard: Yeah. And some of the digging might have been, you know, in part, on Iran's own, you know, volition. So, there's imagery that indicates the Iranians actually the ones that were stuffing dirt into these holes to make sure that the impact of strikes was reduced, or that the material was more protected. So, you know, when we see as commercial satellite imagery is already showing, you know, trucks digging these holes out. It may be the Iranians already have access to this material, at least some pieces.

Tess: Can we add to that? What you mentioned in terms of centrifuge capability, that after 2021 because the JCPOA limits were no longer being respected, they were likely able to stockpile things like certain types of carbon fiber that you need, that you couldn't get under the JCPOA, but you might have a warehouse full of now, or it might be buried underground somewhere, right? So, you have some amount of highly enriched HEU and probably some amount of stockpile left of the components needed to rebuild the advanced centrifuges.

Richard: yeah. And I think our, you know, general sense is that they weren't just, you know, holding materials, but they'd actually fashioned them, the components. And so, you know, not to get too grass about this, but you know, it may very well be that somewhere in Iran was a big stack of IKEA boxes that they could, you know, crack open a bunch of centrifuge and stand them up, and off you go. 

And you know, over time, we've learned something about, you know, the Iranian ability to set up centrifuges. And, you know, basically they can do a cascade of centrifuges in about a week. A cascade is a certain number of centrifuges, roughly in the 160-centrifuge neighborhood is roughly what it takes to have one unit of centrifuges, which we call a cascade. And so, you know, once you have that set up, once you have all the pipes going between it, you can start feeding material through. So again, let's just do the math here, right? You know, the war was about three weeks or so ago that it started. It takes about a week to stand up new centrifuges. If we assume that the Iranians started straight away in some protected location, that means they could have about three cascades already built. Okay, let's assume they didn't. Let's assume they waited until after the ceasefire. Well, it's been a week, so they could absolutely have one already. So, I don't, I don't think it is fear mongering to suggest that the Iranians probably have got some amount of centrifuge components that they could construct into cascades, or, frankly, may have already started doing. 

Then we've got the big issue, weaponization. So, a lot of ink is being spilled on this idea that the Iranians no longer have the ability to take uranium out of centrifuges and put it into bomb. Let's just lay some of this to rest here. And actually, James Acton, your friend from Carnegie, he's done a great bunch of articles and Twitter threads on this but just to summarize some of his work and what other folks are saying too. Yes, it is true that between the United States and Israel, the big above ground sites at Isfahan that could produce uranium metal have been destroyed. Yeah, agreed. But that's actually not necessarily relevant here, because you can still make uranium metal using much smaller scale, laboratory scale equipment. You don't need to have machines that are the size of a warehouse to do this. 

And as James has pointed out, the Manhattan Project did not have factory size laboratories making uranium metal, and it worked. I mean, he and others have pointed out, the chemistry on this is not that hard, and it's fairly straightforward, and it's something that the Iranians absolutely have a technical capacity to do, and probably have some of the equipment to do. So, if they have stored somewhere inside of Iran some of this old equipment from the old weapons program, they could repurpose that very easily. If not, they could probably find a way of setting up in one of these secretive locations, these hardened locations, maybe even those tunnels in Isfahan, all the laboratory equipment that they need to produce uranium metal there. And frankly, once you already have uranium metal, then it's just a question of how far they go along with their weapons work prior to 2003, when they pause the program, and some of the work that they've done subsequently. 

But I don't think anyone should have a doubt that if the Iranians put their mind to it, and the Supreme Leader said go, that with enriched uranium that they can produce into metal, that they could produce, at a minimum, a crude nuclear device, relatively shortly. Whether or not they come out on a missile, that's a different discussion. That's a longer topic. Lot more work has to be done into that. But some kind of crude device, a trinity scale, trinity being U.S.’s first nuclear weapons test, you know, kind of device. That is absolutely inside of Iran's technical competence.

Tess: So, that is extremely helpful. It's consistent, of course, as well, with what the IAEA has been saying. The IAEA’s head, Grossi, he came out and said, maybe these strikes set them back a few months, and it's also, right, notable that the IAEA itself is now not going to know, as one of the responses within Iran to being bombed was a bill being passed through Iran’s parliament to kick out the IAEA. Unknown scope and duration, but you know, the executive branch within Iran has made good on that, and that law has been enacted. 

So, we have a situation where they could be as close to break out essentially, as before, by weeks, if not months from now. We have a situation where we still don't know if they have decided to do so, but it will be arguably harder for us to tell both, because the IAEA is not around, but also, and I'm just taking a gander here, we may have lost some of our own visibility in the aftermath of these strikes. And then third, we fascinatingly have both Iran and the United States saying they're still willing to negotiate, right, which I think is one of the biggest surprises coming down the heels of this whole episode. 

And I just want to read a quote from Trump on Air Force One at a gaggle where he's asked about whether he supports regime change in Iran, because he was, of course, sending at minimum, mixed messages about that during this whole episode. And he says, no, absolutely not. You know, that would bring chaos. But he goes on to say something really interesting about the future of the nuclear program. He says, you know, the Iranians are very good traders, very good businesspeople, and they got a lot of oil, they should be fine. They should be able to rebuild and do a good job.

Okay, so what do you make of that? Are we looking at a big for big kind of deal where, you know, Iranian crude gets back on the market, as long as they agree to some JCPOA-like constraints on the nuclear program, you know, what does the diplomatic trade space look like in the aftermath of this? Before we get into what, you know, what has been done to the NPT regime, where are we on terms of a possible negotiation? And let's take, first, kind of, what you think it might look like in practice, and then let's get into, okay, but what about the lack of trust that means we don't know what would actually be going on behind the scenes in the way that we think we did before?

Richard: Well, and this is where I find myself in a weird position as somebody who helped negotiate the JPOA and JCPOA now being a little skeptical and a little leery of what a negotiated process looks like. And it all goes back to the fundamental point you made about IAEA inspectors. And I just want to foot stomp this. You know, the Iranians did the thing that we expected. After the strikes on the nuclear facility, they kicked out the inspectors from those sites, you know? And again, you're right. We don't actually know how the Iran is going to execute this, but I'll put money on the table right now, the Iranians are going to be prepared to allow inspectors to go poke around Bushehr. Why not? You know, Bushehr is not their Iranian nuclear weapons project. 

But you know, if they asked to go to Natanz or Fordow, frankly, Iran's got the ability to say, I'm sorry, it was attacked and there might be munitions around, we couldn't possibly allow inspectors to go there. We have to clean it up. And this is the worry I have, is, you know, whether or not the Iranian nuclear program is shattered and it's two years away from reconstitution, or whether or not it's two minutes away from reconstitution, the core reality is, we don't know, and the inspectors are not going to be there to give us that confidence, which goes back to what you do in a deal. You know, do I think a big for big is possible? Sure. Frankly, I think Trump wanted to do a big for big. I think he's made very clear that he would be prepared to extend very significant sanctions relief to the Iranians. And you know, his only concern is the nuclear issue. 

You know, he has only once that I can recall brought up the regional issue during this presidential term, and that was when he was in Saudi Arabia, you know, giving the speech that he gave there. All the other times he's only focused on nuclear issues. So, I think if the Iranians said, listen, we'll address your concerns on nuclear as long as you address your sanctions issues, I think he'd be prepared to go along with. And, you know, imagine, if you will, the fact that the Iranians can now play into Trump's own rhetoric. They can say, well, our nuclear program was destroyed. We don't have an enrichment program anymore. So, you know, we're prepared to say, sure we won't have any enrichment at Natanz or Fordow, those facilities. We won't do that, and we won't do that for X number of years. You know, they could make that kind of concession, a big, sweeping bowl concession.

But if we don't have a baseline reestablished as to where the centrifuges, and we don't have a baseline as to where the HEU, we don’t have inspectors in a position to verify all of that, they can make those kinds of concessions and not mean it at all, and have something you know, operating over here clandestinely. 

Tess: This is really important. Let me pause you here, just so folks understand. The reason the JCPOA could work at all is because we had a baseline. We had a baseline confirmed by the IAEA, but also by our own intelligence community and that, you know, those in other states, and they were, you know, consistent with each other with respect to the fact that we could account for the nuclear material, the nuclear facilities, the components needed to go into the kind of program you've been describing. 

From what you just laid out about what likely happened before these strikes took place, and what is likely accelerating in the aftermath of these strikes, the baseline is harder and harder to piece together, both because they've moved stuff around, they know they need to be clandestine, but also because we just don't have the access we used to have.

Richard: Exactly. And this is my big worry, is that, frankly, the strikes may have jailbreaked a bunch of material from safeguard right? You know, the reality is, from 2002, when the program was first exposed publicly, until the strikes, the IAEA was in various different nuclear facilities, was able to document a lot of what was going on, and when the IAEA did not see something, intelligence was in a position to, you know, out it, and basically give us the ability to then ask the IAEA again, as happened with the Fordow facility in 2009. 

So, you could say to me, well, why can't that happen again? You know, maybe six months from now, the U.S. intelligence community finds some secret nuclear facility that the Iranians, you know, have got and you know, could potentially then encourage the IAEA to go, well, this is where I go back to your points of, what is the IAEA inspector access provision going to be now post strikes, you know, what is the Iranian timeline? Are they prepared to negotiate now earnestly, or are they doing this as a way of distracting? 

And, you know, I believe in a diplomatic solution here. I frankly think it's the only way that you're going to have durability into any kind of deal that might be reached that actually prevents Iran from getting nuclear weapons. But this is where the ceasefire actually comes back into mind. The reality is, look, nobody likes the idea of people continuing to shoot missiles at one another, and a ceasefire is a generically good thing to have. I'll stipulate that. But a ceasefire that comes off the way it did, without any kind of conditions, without any kind of negotiation, without any kind of certainty as to what reconstitution looks like, without any clarity as to what would be the potential terms for breach, other than actively firing at one another — well, that's inherently a precarious situation, but it also means that the Iranians right now have got space in which that they can potentially move stuff, hide stuff, and engage in reconstitution that we might not find it out until it's all too late. 

So, to me, going back to what a diplomatic solution looks like, look, I think it needs to start off with clarity as to what the ceasefire involves and what reconstitution can look like. It needs to involve inspector access to any of the cleanup materials. The Iranians right now have got dump trucks, and they're pulling dirt and other things out of Fordow and Natanz. Those can't just simply be disappeared. There needs to be some understanding of what's there to make sure that it's not going someplace over the ridge and potentially being used in a weapons program. There needs to be some ability to verify where the material has gone or if the Iranian state has been destroyed, to have some reasonable approximation of certainty that that's true. 

And if it's not true, there needs to be some kind of engagement between the Iranians, the Israelis and the Americans to say, okay, well, this is what's going to happen if we can't verify where the HU is. And frankly, that might have to include even a return to military strikes, notwithstanding the fact that if there are materials, you know, hidden in the Isfahan tunnels, that may not be a viable way of addressing this problem. And that's the kind of big strategic risk we've seen. 

Tess: So, the Israelis are the P5+1. I'm pushing on that, just because we have now a very different situation where, as you said, there is an arrangement in place of sorts, this ceasefire, right, among belligerent parties to a conflict, as opposed to a diplomatic arrangement among the world's most important powers that are intended to constrain Iran's nuclear program, which was a different set of actors. It included the EU, it included Russia and China, which, by the way, might be inclined to support Iran in its next steps, depending on what happens here. 

So, assuming we can get that clarity on the terms of the ceasefire, assuming we can get some amount of inspector access that gives us some amount of confidence that we can verify where material has gone if it has not been destroyed, what else do we need to see over the next time horizon, given that we won't be as confident in those assessments as we used to be? Does it mean the limits have to be that much tighter, because we're going to have to assume there is some amount of material that has, as you said, “jailbreaks” during the strikes, you know? How do we account for that new reality in a new framework?

Richard: So, I think, yeah, I mean, “can we” is a big question. I mean, so I think if we can, it's going to require a couple things. So first, like you said, the participants have changed. I think they kind of have to, you know? The European partners are still valuable parts of the U.S. security system and so forth, need to be engaged here. They actually still control a pretty significant step, that being the SNAP Act provisions of the JCPOA — the ability to reimpose the U.N. sanctions that were suspended pursuant to the JCPOA. That deadline is still October. And even if I don't think the U.N. sanctions had much economic impact, they absolutely have a central impact in restricting Iran's ability to procure components for its centrifugal missile programs, other nuclear programs as well. 

Tess: And the U.N. Security Council resolution that suspended previous multilateral sanctions on Iran, which had created a chokehold around its nuclear program, basically denying it the ability to import the parts it might need to do the kinds of things Richard has been describing — those sanctions can go back into place, and are set to do so, in fact, in October, unless something else transpires in the interim, which is creating a sort of deadline for diplomacy, a sort of Damocles hanging over these negotiations should they recommence. But as Richard was saying, again, we don't know the extent to which those sanctions were actually being respected by all sides post-2021.

Richard: Yeah, no, for sure. And look, I think if the sanctions can come back into effect, they would have an impact on terms of Iran's procurement pipeline. Frankly, that's part of the reason why the Iranians are also upset about that and don't want to see that happen. So, some kind of resolution on that, some kind of engagement with European partners is essential there. 

But frankly, I think a deal at this point, if you're the Iranians, yeah, you want to deal with the United States to get rid of U.S. sanctions. You're not terribly concerned about European sanctions, because there are none but U.S. sanctions actions have kind of forced European businesses to restrict access anyway. Your big question is whether or not you can have a U.S.-Iran deal that also constrains Israel. And I think for the Iranians now, you would not be satisfied unless you can have a high degree of certainty that the United States can control what the Israelis are going to do. And frankly, the central question I would ask Witkoff is, okay I sign a deal with you, what's your ability to control what Israel does? And I think if Witkoff being honest, his answer has to be, I don't have one, which means, automatically, this is a negotiation that has to involve the Israelis as well. 

So, what are the terms? I think, you know, look, there is a benefit that comes out of the attack in that the Iranians now have a space where they don't have to concede existing enrichment capabilities in order to satisfy the no enrichment provision, right? There aren't. So, you could make an argument that, you know, to the Iranians, look for some period of time, you'll rely on foreign supply of fuel for your nuclear reactors if they're to be built, you know, say, cap it at the next three to be built, or for the next 10 years or something. And you could extend this potentially, if the Iranians agreed to it. 

You know, the Iranians won't like this, but they wouldn't necessarily give up a principled ability to have enrichment, but they potentially would give up a practical one that, frankly, they would have difficulty, you know, addressing right now. That sort of thing maybe creates some sort of space to satisfy everybody on this, especially if the sanctions relief is quite significant. But all this has to come back to verification, and I was already of the mind that the next deal that Trump was going to negotiate needed to be more focused on IAEA inspector access than anything else. I was writing about that in the spring. I couldn't believe that more now, you know? The inspectors need to have the ability to have much more, you know, something closer to anytime, anywhere, access. And they need to be able to report what they are able to see and what they aren't able to see. And that's where there needs to be, you know, immediate action if we see that the Iranians are in fact, hiding something. There needs to be an agreement in principle, that if we find out the Iranians didn't disclose where all their HEU is, that there will be, you know, if not a resumption of hostilities, there'll be some sort of, you know, punishment in terms of sanctions, pressure or something similar. 

But again, being really clear, those are the terms that would come from me, you know, trying to get the Iranians to sign on to this. The Iranian perspective on this might be, under no circumstances we can concede all those things. And, oh, by the way, we're just going to engage in negotiations to buy ourselves time to reconstitute. So, that's another element that needs to be part of this discussion too. There needs to be a process inside the United States of evaluating, what are we seeing? Are we seeing the Iranians actually engaging this seriously, or is this an exercise in buying time and space, and they might not know that for some period of time.

Tess: Might not know it in the period of time that is the most critical, in fact, for doing the things you were just laying out — verifying where the material has gone, right? Getting that transparency, the access that would give us that baseline. We're unfortunately in a situation where the longer we wait before that happens, the harder it will ever be to have clarity. So, I think, from my personal perspective, one more reason why bombing the nuclear program was always going to be such a bad idea. It's created a jailbreak for these materials, or a potential one that we may never regain clarity on, because the timing is not in our favor and inspectors are not in the country.

Richard: And I'll just say on that, I mean, look, this is part of the reason why I probably was a little bit more open to the idea of using force than you might be. But you know, in one of the things I wrote about this back in January, I tried to make really clear to everybody, a deal is still better. A deal achieves all these things without, of course, having to kill people, which is an ideal scenario in most circumstances, right? On top of which it's much more durable. It's something we can trust more. 

But if you are going to resort to force, you have to understand that this is not going to be a one and done. It comes with a high degree of risk. It comes with a high likelihood of missing stuff. And so, a huge element of the decision to use force is a commitment that you are now potentially on that path, and that you might have to once again use force trying to address this, that frankly, might have to go up the level of targets and start trying to inflict more regime damage, not necessarily to get regime change, but instead, to get the regime to make concessions on the nuclear program. All as a way of saying, people who are saying, oh, now we're done. It's been totally obliterated. We can walk off. No, no, no, no, no, the old Pottery Barn rule that Colin Powell used to talk about — you break it, you buy it — still applies, even if you are not invading and occupying someplace. 

Now, you cannot just simply say, we still have Fordow, so everything's good. No, no, no, you need to be maintaining vigilance. You need to have, you know, your own intelligence service, and you need to be working with inspectors. This is not something that you get to walk away from just because you picked something that was very tactically proficient, very difficult and all that, but at the same time, didn't have the same complications that diplomacy did. Okay, fine, but don't think that there are no complications that come from force. There are the same ones that came from a diplomatic deal about risks of cheating, risks of people breaking out, people not disclosing materials, and the Iranians trying to hide stuff, on top of which every incentive in the world now for the Iranians to do exactly those things. 

Tess: Yeah, the tail is longer and bigger than the initial bombs dropped. And I think you aid out why very, very well, not to mention, of course, that all of those uses of force would also be unlawful unless there's an actual, imminent threat of an armed attack emanating from Iran's nuclear program. But putting that aside for a minute, or actually, you know, using that as a backdrop for the pivot from here, just to round out the conversation, is the lesson from all of this, if you have nukes, for North Korea, you won't get bombed. You get a love letter, as Ben Rhodes said the other day. And if you don't have nukes, and you are at least in the NPT framework, if not in complete compliance with it, you do get bombed, and not only that, the threat of force, of essentially permanent war hanging over the civilians in your country, right, goes on for the foreseeable future — that doesn't seem viable. It doesn't, it certainly doesn't seem compatible with having an NPT framework, with having an IAEA, right?

Is there a way to step back from that becoming the new normal, where, you know, essentially, the maintenance that you were describing of a use of force regime to try to handle nuclear threats brings us to essentially continual chaos, rather than an ability to use international organizations that were purpose built to do so to try to contain that threat? 

Richard: Yeah. I mean, look, if we go back the history of nuclear proliferation, and you could expand this a little bit with W&B proliferation, but nuclear, I think, is a decent approximation. We have a number of circumstances in which countries have considered nuclear weapons and then walked back. A lot of those were U.S. allies during the Cold War, but we’ve got the other examples as well, South Africa being the clearest example.

And, you know, that, combined with the fact that we've got a bunch of states that are operating inside the NPT system with safeguards and similar ought to give you some sense that safeguard systems can work, and can give people a measure of security as to people's own compliance. And so, from that standpoint, you can still have an NPT. You can have an NPT that provides mutual reassurance to a bunch of different countries and similar.

I think what we found is that the NPT’s remedies for noncompliance are hugely contested and hugely problematic. And so let's look at just a couple examples, right? So, in the Iraq case, the Iraqis were cheating on their obligations. Let's have no doubt about this. Prior to the first Gulf War, and when the first Gulf War was completed, the nuclear program was in tatters, and they never reconstituted again. That didn't stop people from being afraid that they had, because we still had a regime that we did not trust, and we had attempts to evade inspectors. And so, a military solution that annihilated a program but left that regime in place created enough uncertainties that the United States and partners decided to take military action again in 2003.

So, I'm not saying that Iran is going to be like Iraq, but I'm disturbed enough by the uncertainties created that it's dinging in my head. On top of which, we've got a number of cases in which countries that were regimes that were not favored by the United States, that pursued nuclear weapons options, had those options taken away from them, one diplomatically, one militarily — Libya, Syria. And those governments are no longer in charge. Now, I'm not saying that there's a direct correlation between those two things. I think it'd be hard to make a case that Libya’s Gaddafi gives up nuclear weapons and is deposed several years later. 

But you know who does make that correlation? It's the Iranian leadership. And, you know who also makes that correlation about Syria? The Iranians. So, this is where, like, you know, what worries me is not just the absolute sense of what contributes from one case to the other, but the way states that are in the contested space perceive their best choice. And if you are the Iranians, and you're not looking at the world and saying, well, you know, we could be a Libya or we could be a Syria or we could be a Saddam Hussein — none of those work. But you know what does work? And on top of which, it's not just the North Korea model. I have heard Iranian officials talk about how they want the India model. So, they want the ability to test nuclear weapons, but because they are then a great power, a great historical state, an empire of peoples, a great civilization, that they will eventually have the United States come and say, let us do business with you, and we'll let that nuclear stuff go off to the side. 

There are a number of Iranians who said, we just want the India model, and we think we can get it because we are important or an important point from an economic perspective, geopolitical perspective and historical perspective. And so, all of this adds up to me. I think the NPT system can still function. I think the problem with it is the contested spaces countries are going to look at this and have a lot more conviction that deals don't work, the U.S. walks away. Or, they leave you so vulnerable, a la Libya, that you're going to be deposed. Military force in the first instance only leads to military force in the second instance, and that, you know, Saddam Hussein not reconstituting was his big mistake, not the idea of pursuing nuclear weapons in the first. 

So, that's part of the reason why I think if you are sitting in Tehran right now, you're potentially making some choices that, sitting in Washington, I'm pretty upset by, and it's part of the reason why I think we may not be taking the right lessons from history if we automatically assume that military action is going to achieve some of our ends. It might actually be contributing to the long-term damage. 

Tess: Yeah, I absolutely agree with all of that, and I think there's a lot we need to consider about how we as a domestic polity constrain that resort to force, which is a whole other conversation, not to mention the conversation we could be having about the National Security Council, where we both used to spend a lot of time, functioning in a way that might have vetted some of these very predictable outcomes. 

But then again, we have a president himself who seems to think he derives some of his power from unpredictability. So, perhaps there's only so much an institution can do, 

Well, I can't thank you enough for not only giving us such a deep dive in such a short time, but also one that has such a fantastically rich historical perspective, and just really keen insight in terms of where we go from here, you know, how we've seen this movie play out before in other states, and how that's affecting the current calculus. And a little bit of a glass half-full — might I just seize the moment to mention — in terms of the NPT regime more broadly not being entirely broken, and the prospects for maybe finally learning some of these lessons, even if in this moment, we are not necessarily on the path of doing so, given who's sitting in which seats in Washington and Tehran. 

But if there's anyone who I would love to keep having this conversation with, it is you. And in the interest of time, we can leave it there for today. Thank you so much for joining us, and hopefully we'll get a chance to do this again in the near future. 

Richard: It's always great talking to you, and I really appreciate the opportunity to share at least some of my thinking. And like you say, this is one that's not going away anytime soon, so I have a feeling if we want to chat about this again, we'll have ample opportunity.

Tess: Indeed. Well, thank you again, and it's been a pleasure having you. 

This episode was hosted by me, Tess Bridgeman and produced by Maya Nir with help from Isaac Rubinstein. Special thanks to our guest, Richard Nephew. You can read his latest article, Did the Attacks on Iran Succeed? in Foreign Affairs. For additional coverage and analysis of the conflict between Iran and Israel in the U.S., visit the Just Security website at justsecurity.org and read the articles linked in this show's notes. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.