Opinion What Trump wants to do is dismantle Iran’s nuclear programme

The JCPOA included limitations on the enrichment levels of uranium, R&D, and operations of Iran’s nuclear facilities. It included detailed monitoring and verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to ensure Iran was not diverting nuclear materials for military purposes. The deal was a complex one that did not actually terminate the Iranian program but sought to reduce it to levels that would make a potential Iranian breakout to fabricating nuclear weapons difficult. An important provision was that it would expire after 15 years and have to be renegotiated for a further period.

In 2015, the IAEA had acknowledged that Iran had worked on nuclear weapons before 2003, but since then, the Agency “has no credible indications of activities in Iran relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device after 2009.”

In 2018, during Trump’s first term, the US “withdrew” from the deal that had been jointly negotiated with Iran, Russia, China, Germany, France, and the UK, arguing that it no longer served its strategic interests. At the time, there were no claims that Iran had violated the agreement from either the US, the other signatories, or the IAEA.

The US action was purely political, based on Trump’s antipathy for Iran. He attacked the temporary nature of the JCPOA and the lack of controls on Iran’s ballistic missile program. Thereafter, the US reinstated sanctions and began a policy of “maximum pressure” against Iran. After the US withdrawal, Iran gradually reduced its compliance and began to enrich uranium to higher levels, though the IAEA monitoring continued. So what is Donald Trump’s motive in seeking to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Iran now?

Since Trump pulled out of the JCPOA, Iran’s nuclear programme has made substantial advances and is closer to making nuclear weapons. Earlier this month, the director-general of the IAEA expressed concern over the fact that the Iranian stockpile of uranium enriched up to 60 per cent had increased to 275 kg, up from 182 kg in the past quarter. It is well known that if this was enriched to 90 per cent, it could be used as a core of at least six nuclear weapons.

The DG also said that while Iran claimed it had declared all nuclear material, the IAEA had found traces of uranium particles at locations that had not been declared as per the nuclear safeguards agreement. He added that there was a need to resolve some of these discrepancies “to provide assurance that Iran’s nuclear programme is exclusively peaceful”.

What kind of a deal does Trump want? Let’s be clear, he doesn’t want the old JCPOA but a new one that will effectively eliminate Iranian nuclear capacity, civil or military. In 2018, the Israelis had stolen a cache of archival documents from a warehouse in Tehran, which showed Iran had indeed worked on nuclear weapons in the past. What the documents revealed was that the Iranian capabilities were more advanced than had been believed and, in the event of a breakout, it would be able to fabricate nuclear weapons within a matter of months.

Where the JCPOA had left the Iranian civil nuclear programme intact, Trump, in all likelihood, is seeking to dismantle all of it. He is probably motivated by his strongly pro-Israeli position, and the US is undoubtedly coordinating its moves with Israel, which will be the principal beneficiary of such a deal.

Iran’s conventional military capabilities have been deeply damaged by Israel in last year’s aerial war. Iran’s allies, Hamas and Hezbollah, are on the ropes. Now, Tel Aviv wants a knockout punch to eliminate what it sees as the ultimate threat to itself — Iran’s nuclear programme.

In this, neither the US nor Israel is bothered by the Iranian perspective, which has been shaped by the terrible war (1980-1988) that was unleashed on the country by Iraq and which had American backing. Iran lost nearly 300,000 dead and also had to face chemical weapons attacks. Iran is motivated, too, by the need to avoid the fate of Iraq, which faced enormous death and destruction at the hands of the US between 2003-2011 on entirely fictitious grounds that it had a hidden nuclear weapons programme.

An Israeli-American military attack on Iran is a real possibility in the event that Iran refuses to enter into a new deal. But such a war will have fraught consequences not just for Iran but also for the region. Attacks on the power plant at Bushehr could contaminate the Persian Gulf. Iranian missiles could ravage Gulf allies of the US like UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain. US and Israeli bombs could devastate Iran. Oil prices would go through the roof, and the flames of the conflict could lick the shores of India.

The writer is a Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi