Interview With Responsible Statecraft
June 6, 2025
An innovative solution for bridging this deal-ending divide has emerged. It is not clear who first suggested it. Iran’s Foreign Minister, Abbas Araghchi, says that the Omani mediators made proposals that removed obstacles. Other reports credit Iran with the idea. Others say it was suggested by Oman and adopted by the United States.
The idea is that Iran joins Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in a nuclear enrichment consortium. In some versions, other regional partners are also included. Such a consortium could resolve the paradox created by the American demand that Iran give up its uranium enrichment and Iran’s insistence that it will never give up its uranium enrichment. Components of the enrichment process would be spread across countries with each sharing all but none fully possessing all. Iran could have its enriched uranium, but Iran could not fully enrich uranium.
The modern incarnation is similar to an idea first proposed by von Hippel and former Iranian nuclear negotiator Seyed Hossein Mousavian in a 2023 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that argued that a multinational consortium in the Middle East could ensure that uranium is produced only for peaceful purposes.
The key question has always been whether Iran will be allowed to enrich uranium on its own soil. And nothing has changed now. Mousavian says that nuclear negotiations with Iran have failed when its right as a signatory to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty (NPT) to peaceful uranium enrichment have been denied, and they have succeeded when that right was granted. The key question now in negotiations is whether Iran would be allowed to enrich uranium on its own soil. Since the consortium story broke, the answer to that question has swung back and forth on a reporting pendulum.
The problem is that Iran is unlikely to agree to join a consortium that prohibits it from enriching on its own soil. One possible solution, proposed by von Hippel, Mousavian, and their colleagues at Princeton, is to let Iran enrich but not on its own soil. In this plan, Iran would build centrifuges and ship them to a partner country where Iranian technicians would operate them.
Iran is likely to refuse a proposal that insists it surrenders its right to enrich both because, as Slavin told RS, of the country’s well-founded suspicions about the reliability of external sources, and because, as Mousavian told me, denying Iran a right that is granted to every other signatory of the NPT “constitutes a national humiliation.”
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/iran-nuclear-deal-2672318762/