Iran's nuclear weapons program is like Schrödinger's cat: It both does and doesn't exist at the same time.
Last week, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz told ABC that "Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. All options are on the table to ensure it does not have one. And that's all aspects of Iran's program. That's the missiles, the weaponization, the enrichment." But this week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told the Senate that "Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader [Ali] Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003."
The seeming contradiction in the Trump administration's line is actually a fine-toothed distinction. Iran is currently enriching uranium up to 60 percent, according to a leaked report by United Nations nuclear inspectors. It's far above the 2 to 5 percent enrichment level used to fuel power plants, yet below the 90 percent necessary to build a bomb. As Gabbard said at the Tuesday hearing, "Iran's enriched uranium stockpile…is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons."
Still, buying a lot of flour isn't the same thing as baking a cake. Iranian elites are openly debating whether they should build a bomb, with some arguing that Iranian nuclear policy should change if the country comes under more serious threat. Should Khamenei give a green light to weaponization, bringing the uranium from 60 percent to 90 percent enrichment would take a little under a week, and assembling a working bomb would take additional weeks to months.
Despite the high stakes of nuclear proliferation, the issue isn't well understood by the public. Leave aside complex technical details like different levels of uranium enrichment. Even basic facts are garbled in the public understanding. U.S. policy since the Bush administration has been to go to war to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon bomb, but a majority of Americans believe that Iran already has nuclear weapons, according to a poll from 2021.
The confusion has so far benefited hawks. Although President Donald Trump has said that the "only thing" he's concerned about with Iran "is that they can't have a nuclear weapon," Waltz has been pushing a wide definition of "nuclear program," as he alluded to in his ABC interview. Last month, Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum defining all nuclear fuel processing and "nuclear-capable" missiles (read: almost all long-range missiles) as part of "Iran's nuclear program."
The same memo also includes a laundry list of complaints unrelated to nuclear weapons, including that Iran supports the Houthi movement in Yemen, launched (non-nuclear) missile attacks on Israel last year, and "bears responsibility for the horrific Hamas massacres committed on October 7, 2023."
In fact, the Trump administration may attack Iran simply for refusing to talk. Trump sent a letter to Khamenei with a two-month deadline to reach a deal. The letter warned that "there would be military consequences if there was no direct negotiation," Gabbard said at her hearing.
On the other hand, Trump administration envoy Steven Witkoff told Tucker Carlson over the weekend that Trump really just wants a "verification program" for Iran's nuclear development. "Hawkish think-tanks in DC are starting to panic that Trump will settle" for a weaker version of the 2015 nuclear deal, writes Gregg Carlstrom, The Economist's correspondent for the Middle East.
After Trump's letter, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that "the way is open" for negotiations. While Iran is still preparing a response to the letter, it may propose indirect talks mediated by the United Arab Emirates, reports Amwaj.media, a British news site.
The standoff over the Iranian nuclear program began in 2002, after Iran was discovered to be secretly enriching uranium. The Iranian government quickly shut down its research into nuclear weapons, but insisted that it had the right to keep enriching uranium for civilian research and nuclear power plants. In 2015, the U.S. and five other world powers agreed to lift economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for strict limits on the Iranian nuclear program.
Trump tore up that agreement in 2018, hoping to get a better deal. But his advisers introduced poison pills into diplomacy. Much like Waltz's demands, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a 12-point ultimatum that added up to total disarmament and regime change. Meanwhile, now-disgraced National Security Adviser John Bolton opposed efforts by Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) and French President Emmanuel Macron to get Trump in the same room with the Iranian foreign minister.
Bolton also undermined Trump's diplomacy with North Korea by demanding the "Libya model" of nuclear disarmament. (In case you've forgotten, Libya fell into civil war in 2011 and its leader was tortured to death by U.S.-backed rebels after giving up its nuclear program.) The Washington Post last month reported that Trump administration officials were demanding a "Libya-style abandonment of [Iranian] nuclear facilities."
If some aspects of U.S. policy today are reminiscent of the first Trump administration, others are an echo of the Bush administration. The National Security Presidential Memorandum accuses Iran of supporting Al Qaeda and trying "to embed sleeper cells in the Homeland" for "terrorist activity." These are vague, dubious accusations—as Carlson points out, zero "Americans have been killed by Iran on American soil" over the past two decades—and almost exactly the same ones that were lobbed at Iraq during the buildup to the 2003 war.
Just as in the Iraq War, hawks now seem determined to get their war whether or not they have the evidence to back their grievances. Carlstrom reports that Israel is on track to bomb Iran "within six months," at least according to U.S. intelligence.
"The absence of evidence of a nuclear weapons program in Iran is not necessarily the evidence of absence," Jason Brodsky, policy director at the hawkish United Against Nuclear Iran nonprofit, told Israeli television on Tuesday. That line could have been lifted almost exactly from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's 2002 press conference making the case for war with Iraq.
"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know," Rumsfeld said at the time. "We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know."
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