Here we go again: Iran nuclear talks

Per Reuters reporting, a senior Iranian official claims the upcoming talks with the United States in Oman (if they happen) will be limited strictly to the nuclear issue, with Iran’s missile program explicitly off the table. U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Rubio, have signaled they want a broader agenda, arguing that talks confined to the nuclear file alone would not be meaningful.

I personally think it would be a mistake to address the nuclear issue alone. But if the United States and Iran are serious about addressing the nuclear issue narrowly, rather than folding it into a broader confrontation, then the scope of negotiations is actually quite constrained. At this point, the nuclear file is no longer about preventing the emergence of a fully intact Iranian weapons program. Much of that infrastructure has already been degraded. What remains is a more limited but still consequential set of issues: Iran’s highly enriched uranium (HEU) stockpile and the absence of a complete, verifiable declaration of its nuclear facilities.

The 12-Day War materially changed the nuclear landscape. Israeli and U.S. strikes damaged key elements of Iran’s enrichment enterprise, including centrifuge halls, power supply infrastructure, and supporting facilities associated with enrichment operations. While the full extent of the damage remains contested and cannot be independently verified, the effect was to disrupt Iran’s ability to operate enrichment at scale in the near term. This was not a comprehensive dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear know-how or scientific base, but it did degrade the industrial backbone of the program as it existed before the war.

As a result, the nuclear problem today is less about an active enrichment surge and more about residual risks. The most important of these is the fate of Iran’s existing HEU stockpile, material enriched well beyond civilian requirements and accumulated prior to the strikes. Even with damaged facilities, possession of that material continues to carry proliferation risk, particularly in the absence of international oversight.

This is where the issue becomes squarely an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) problem. The IAEA’s challenge is not simply access, but accounting. Iran has not provided a full or updated declaration of its nuclear facilities, nor has it restored the monitoring arrangements that would allow inspectors to reestablish continuity of knowledge. Without declarations, inspectors cannot confirm what survived the strikes, what was moved, or what may be recoverable. Verification gaps now matter as much as physical damage.

From a negotiating standpoint, this narrows the agenda considerably. Surrendering or transferring the HEU stockpile would directly address the most acute remaining nuclear risk. It would not require Iran to abandon enrichment permanently or accept sweeping restrictions on its scientific capacity. It would simply remove the material that shortens breakout timelines and heightens suspicion at a moment when Iran’s enrichment infrastructure is already degraded.

At the same time, removing HEU alone would not resolve longer-term concerns. Iran retains the technical expertise to reconstitute enrichment over time, including through parallel or covert pathways. That reality underscores why declarations and inspections are inseparable from material disposition. Negotiations therefore hinge less on intent than on sequencing: how HEU is handled, when inspectors return, what facilities are declared, and how monitoring is sustained.

The irony is that, compared to ballistic missiles or Iran’s regional proxy network, the nuclear issue is now arguably the easiest part of the problem to address. The Iranian regime is weaker than it has been in years and appears to be searching for a way out of a deteriorating strategic position. Against that backdrop, giving up HEU and restoring transparency would be a relatively modest concession, far less existential than Tehran often portrays it to be. The fact that even this limited step remains contested says less about the difficulty of the nuclear issue itself than about the political constraints Iran now faces at home and abroad.