May 01, 2026 11:50 am IST

Opinion | Iran May Be Doing With Its Nukes What Another 'Rogue' Regime Did 20 Years Ago

A rogue state got away with its nuclear weapons programme decades ago, defying all sanctions. Iran may be going down the same path.

Naresh Kaushik Naresh Kaushik Columnist

Naresh Kaushik Columnist

Six months after Iran signed the 2015 nuclear deal with the Obama administration and five other major powers, the Russian ship Mikhail Dudin departed the Islamic Republic, carrying 12.5 tonnes of Iran's enriched uranium. The removal of 97% of Iran's total enriched uranium without firing a single bullet was President Obama's biggest foreign policy achievement. The move left the Islamic country with too little uranium to make a bomb. But Donald Trump, who became US president a year later, called the deal "horrible", "one-sided", and the "worst in history", and pulled the US out of the agreement in 2018, ignoring the UN watchdog IAEA's conclusion that Tehran was complying with its provisions.

The US withdrawal from the 2015 landmark agreement with Iran, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), appears to be Trump's worst decision, one that could haunt the United States forever. The deal, backed by all five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, was a major US success story. For Iran, the JCPOA marked a significant departure from its nuclear doctrine, under which weaponisation had been an option for decades.

Today, Trump has helped revive that option with potentially more dangerous implications.

Hardliners in Iran, particularly the commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), had been furious with the moderate President Hassan Rouhani for signing the JCPOA. But they could not protest much, as the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, had backed him in the hope that the country would be free of sanctions, which, in turn, would revive the economy and end their isolation. It was Khamenei who had prevented Iran's nuclear scientists from crossing the threshold to produce a weapon. He wrongly believed that merely having the capability to produce a nuclear weapon would be a deterrent.

Trump is now desperate to secure an agreement with Iran over its nuclear programme. He has promised to negotiate a better deal than Obama's, but his decision to withdraw from the JCPOA and to join Israel's war in June last year and again this year has made such an achievement nearly impossible. Iran has flatly rejected Trump's demand to surrender its stockpiles of enriched uranium. On April 30, Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, said in a written........

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