Rod Lyon

The “cash-for-uranium concept” is literally just the JCPOA 😭 This MoU is increasingly sounding like a watered down version of the 2015 deal. The two sides appear to be negotiating over issues that the JCPOA had settled: the downblending or shipment of enriched uranium abroad (Annex I, Section J); options for medical isotope production (Annex I, Section H); supply of nuclear fuel for the TRR (Annex I, Section J). The MoU will also - like the JCPOA - have to include time limitations and sanctions relief, which were at the heart of the criticisms JCPOA opponents levelled against the deal. Yet, unlike the JCPOA, I have heard no mention of measures to monitor and verify compliance, cap uranium enrichment capacity into the future (through limits on centrifuge numbers, models and R&D), address potential for a plutonium pathway, manage procurement into Iran of proliferation-sensitive material, etc. At this point, it’s at best useless - and, at worst, counter-productive - to bang the “we told you so” drum. Better that the anti-JCPOA camp realises that diplomacy is the only sustainable solution and that there is no such thing as a perfect deal late than not at all. But there also needs to be accountability for the fact that the delay and the lesson-learning have come at devastating and needless cost. Trump will of course sell whatever agreement he comes up with, however shoddily pulled together, as being better than the JCPOA. What would actually make an agreement better than the 2015 deal? If the final agreement manages to secure a moratorium on enrichment, and if it re-establishes longer-term JCPOA-style restrictions on the full range of concerning nuclear activities, and if it gets similar or greater visibility of the programme as the JCPOA, and if it manages to include restrictions on Iranian missiles and disruptive regional activities - then, that would indeed be a better deal than the JCPOA. But, as the Italians say, “if my grandmother had wheels, she would be a bicycle.”