A seven-page proposal was on the table. Then Trump learnt a tantalising fact

Washington: At the third round of talks between US and Iranian officials in Geneva last week – mediated by Oman – the Iranians handed over a seven-page proposal outlining the country’s future uranium enrichment needs. The Americans were not impressed.

“We joked that even though we were in Switzerland, the proposal was like Swiss cheese,” one senior Trump administration official said.

The negotiators reported back to Donald Trump that a deal with Iran was technically possible, but unlikely – especially the kind of deal the US president wanted.

“We said, ‘Look, if you want us to make an Obama-type deal, maybe an Obama-plus deal, we could probably get one done’,” the official said, referring to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated under former president Barack Obama. “It would take months ... They’re basically playing games with us all over the place.”

Trump loathes Obama’s agreement and cancelled it in his first term. He regularly describes it as the worst deal ever made. The idea of signing something akin to it was never going to fly.

Especially as, according to a report published by US news site Axios on Tuesday (US time), Trump had just been told a tantalising fact. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had called him on Monday, February 23, with a tip that Iran’s supreme leader and top advisers were to meet in the same location on Saturday morning.

They could all be taken out in one fell swoop.

US officials have since spoken of a limited window of opportunity to pummel the Iranian regime. Speaker of the House of Representatives Mike Johnson – one of the Gang of Eight congressional leaders briefed on February 24, and directly before the attack – said there was “a narrow and unique opportunity to act, and if that window had passed, it would have been much more difficult for us to achieve the mission”.

The White House confirmed the Netanyahu tip-off on Wednesday. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said it was important to the timing of the strikes, though the president was independently forming the view that they were necessary.

Indeed, Trump was already receiving increasingly pessimistic reports from his top negotiators in Geneva: all-purpose special envoy Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.

Witkoff told Trump, and later told Fox News, the Iranians had openly boasted about having a stockpile of 460 kilograms of 60 per cent-enriched uranium, which could be enriched to weapons-grade 90 per cent in about seven to 10 days. He said that was enough for 11 nuclear bombs. They also had 1000 kilograms of 20 per cent-enriched uranium, which might take only weeks to reach military-grade.

Those claims roughly match the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) report last year that said Iran had 440.9 kilograms of highly enriched uranium on June 13, before Israel and the US launched an attack on the country’s nuclear infrastructure. Inspectors have not been able to access Iran’s facilities since that attack.

If Witkoff’s account of the talks is to be believed, it would indicate those stockpiles were not decimated by Operation Midnight Hammer, which Trump said had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Claims about the state of Iran’s nuclear program – and that it is close to having a nuclear weapon – have been ventilated for decades, with Netanyahu one of the prominent fearmongers. But is that claim accurate today?

“No,” said the director-general of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi, when he appeared on CNN on Tuesday. Grossi said there was no evidence of Iran engaging in a systemic, structured program of building a nuclear weapon.

However, he said there were “serious concerns” about Iran unjustifiably amassing massive stockpiles of near-military-grade uranium, and its lack of transparency about inspections. Israel and the US might conclude there was only one reason Iran would do these things, Grossi said, but the IAEA would not speculate about intentions.

On a background briefing call with reporters, two senior Trump administration officials said Grossi’s remarks to CNN contradicted what he had told Witkoff the day before. Grossi tried to clarify his position on X.

“I have been very clear and consistent in my reports on Iran’s nuclear program: while there has been no evidence of Iran building a nuclear bomb, its large stockpile of near-weapons-grade enriched uranium and refusal to grant my inspectors full access are cause for serious concern,” he wrote.

“For these reasons, my previous reports indicate that unless and until Iran assists the IAEA in resolving the outstanding safeguards issues, the agency will not be in a position to provide assurance that Iran’s nuclear program is exclusively peaceful.”

In other words, it is difficult to give Iran the benefit of the doubt when it is enriching uranium the way that it is.

The two US officials indicated they did not know exactly where the highly enriched uranium was located. A lot was in Isfahan, a nuclear site that was smashed in the June strikes but has been spared, so far, this time. Some might be in the Natanz facility, an official said, specifically an underground area called tunnel 216, “where we know Iranian officials have been trying to get in, even though the front door has been largely shut down”.

There was another factor that worried Witkoff and Kushner in their dealings with the Iranians: a facility called the Tehran Research Reactor, ostensibly a civilian facility making medical and industrial radioisotopes.

According to two senior Trump administration officials, Iran, in its 10-year plan, wanted to increase uranium enrichment at the TRR. But the IAEA was aware the facility already had enough nuclear fuel for seven to eight years of Iran’s needs, they said.

One official said they did some “fast math” that suggested the TRR had not been making any radioisotopes, and the fuel supply was “being stockpiled along with all the other stockpiling that had been done at Natanz, Isfahan and Fordow”, another key Iranian nuclear site.

“The claim they were using a research reactor to do good for the Iranian people was a complete pretence to hide the fact that they were stockpiling there,” the official said.

In 2021, Iran announced its plans to enrich uranium to 60 per cent, ostensibly to make radiopharmaceuticals, and to activate 1000 centrifuge machines at Natanz. Centrifuges are critical to the enrichment process.

Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, has denied Iran wants a nuclear weapon. In recent appearances on US television networks, he said such a weapon would contravene Islam. But he refused to sacrifice the country’s enrichment program, saying it was a matter of national pride and dignity.

“As a sovereign country, we have every right to decide for ourselves, by ourselves,” he told CBS News last week. “We are not going to give it up. There is no legal reason to do that while everything is peaceful.”

Iran also has the right to a civilian nuclear program as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty – though it has been found in breach of its obligations under that agreement.

Spencer Faragasso, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Science and International Security, a think tank that advocates against the spread of nuclear weapons, said an Iran with any amount of highly enriched uranium posed a danger to the world. “No other countries in the world produce 60 per cent uranium except countries that have nuclear weapons,” he said.

Faragasso said the June strikes severely destroyed or disabled the three Iranian enrichment plants, but it was not known what happened to the uranium stockpiles, and the Iranians were clear that they wanted to rebuild their ability to enrich.

There are other facilities the think tank has been tracking – namely Pickaxe Mountain, a heavily fortified site just south of Natanz. Construction began in 2020, and Faragasso says it could be a future enrichment site: “We would hope that would get struck or hit.”

In his view, regardless of whether Iran posed an imminent threat, it was the right time to take out the regime.

“It’s a regime that murders its people. It’s a regime that funds terrorism. It’s also a regime that happens to be very weak at this exact moment,” he says. “The grand scheme of things is that the situation is not going to get easier if you wanted to strike the regime. It’s only an uphill battle.”

That argument ultimately carried the day in the White House – even if, as has become evident in the days since the first strike, there were many reasons to attack now, including the urging of the Israelis.

“It was very clear [the Iranians] were trying to buy time,” one senior Trump administration official said. “They basically offered us a lot of political wins and concessions, but they were unwilling to give up the building blocks of what they needed to preserve to get a bomb. It was a very obvious conclusion that there was no deal to do that would have created a different long-term paradigm.”

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