A Trump deal with Iran may hinge on the number zero

Washington: Zero.

As the Trump administration begins negotiations with Iran to avoid possible war, that number defines the diplomatic challenge.

Zero is how much uranium President Donald Trump says he would allow Iran to enrich under any deal to defuse the latest crisis between Washington and Tehran. Enrichment is the process of refining uranium metal into a more potent form suitable for nuclear power or weapons.

Trump's hard-line position is known as "zero enrichment."

"We have one very, very clear red line, and that is enrichment," Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, told ABC News in May. "We cannot allow even 1% of an enrichment capability."

That is believed to be the position Witkoff carried to his meeting with Iranian officials in Oman on Friday.

Iranian officials say they can never accept it. Iran has a right to enrich nuclear material under the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, they argue.

That is a powerful talking point, analysts say. But it also reflects the country's intense pride in a nuclear program that was built over many decades at immense cost and that has become a symbol of Iranian independence.

In an interview with CNN this week, Iran's foreign minister and chief nuclear negotiator, Abbas Araghchi, called Iran's right to enrich uranium nonnegotiable in the coming talks. Last June, he told reporters that enrichment was "our undeniable right."

The binary nature of those two positions makes compromise nearly impossible, arms control experts say. Some warn that Trump's zero enrichment position, should he cling to it, amounts to a poison pill sure to make the talks fail.

"If Trump does insist on zero enrichment, there's not going to be a deal," said Kelsey Davenport, the director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, a think tank in Washington. "Iran is not going to forgo what it views as a national right."

The question is especially important because the latest talks have focused solely on nuclear issues, even though many Iran hawks within the Trump administration and Congress insist that any acceptable deal must include limits on other Iranian activity. That includes Tehran's ballistic missile program and support for militant groups across the Middle East.

Witkoff, a longtime friend of Trump who serves as a kind of roving presidential envoy, met with Iranian officials in Oman on Friday, along with Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who has no formal government position. Araghchi told state media Friday that the talks had gotten off to a "good start." The White House did not immediately offer a summary of the meeting.

The talks come amid Trump's threats against Iran, backed by his deployment of military forces to the Middle East. Trump has seesawed between saber rattling and diplomacy with Tehran. The last round of U.S. negotiations with Iran were cut short in June, when Trump joined an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear program.

Trump renewed his threats after Iran brutally suppressed mass street protests this winter, and has suggested that this is Iran's last chance to strike a deal before further attacks that could topple its government.

To make progress toward such a deal, the sides must reach some understanding on whether Iran will be allowed to continue enriching uranium.

Even experts who believe that Trump must accommodate Iran's claim to a "right" to enrich say that claim is misguided.

Iranian leaders have staked out the position for more than a decade, dating to negotiations with the Obama administration that led to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Under that agreement among several nations, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, Iran accepted strict limits on its nuclear program in return for relief from harsh U.S. economic sanctions.

Trump abandoned that deal in 2018, leading Iran to accelerate its nuclear program to the threshold of bomb-making capability. Last year's U.S. and Israeli strikes severely damaged Iran's nuclear facilities, including one deep under a mountain at Fordo. But experts say that Iran could still revive its nuclear program.

The crux of Iran's claim to a right to enrich uranium rests on its status as a party to the nonproliferation treaty, an international arms control pact signed by nearly every country in the world. Article IV of that treaty guarantees the "inalienable right" of its signers to develop and use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.

Iranian officials say that language clearly establishes a country's right to produce its own fuel for atomic energy and medical research projects, which Tehran calls the purpose of its nuclear program.

But no Western nation believes that, and ample intelligence points to Iran's keen interest in nuclear weapons. Even the Obama administration, which some critics said was too accommodating of Iran, insisted that the military dimensions of Iran's program negated any enrichment right contained in the Nonproliferation Treaty.

"The question hinges on intentionality," said Gary Samore, a former National Security Council aide in the Obama White House who focused on Iran's nuclear program. "If you believe their program is purely peaceful, then they have a legitimate claim to a right to enrich."

"If you think the Iranian enrichment program is just a cover to build up to a nuclear weapon option," Samore said, "then they don't have that right."

There is no authoritative arbiter for the question. The treaty does not have a body that would make such decisions. And the 2015 nuclear deal fudged the question. While the agreement allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium -- to levels of potency well below what is needed to fashion a nuclear bomb -- it did not explicitly recognize that the country had such a right.

Samore agreed that a "zero enrichment" demand by Trump could doom the nuclear talks.

"As a political matter, I think it would be extraordinarily hard for Iran to renounce its right to enrichment," he said. "They have made it part of their narrative for so many years now."

But under the threat of American force, it is possible that Iran might agree out of "desperation" to temporarily suspend its enrichment program without giving up its claimed "right," Samore said.

If the enrichment issue is resolved, however, other major obstacles loom. Speaking to reporters Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that "for talks to actually lead to something meaningful," they would have to cover topics such as Iran's ballistic missiles, sponsorship of terrorism and "the treatment of their own people."

Rubio did not respond directly to a question about whether the United States was open to compromise over Iran's assertion of a right to enrich.