By Henry Sokolski and Sharon Squassoni
In an apparent gesture of moderation, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, recently announced Tehran would renew talks with Washington. Gharibabadi made one seemingly reasonable condition: that the United States had to recognize Iran’s rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). This is code for Iran insisting on its NPT “right” to make nuclear fuel.
The United States, along with many other like-minded nations, has allowed—in both the Bush II and the Obama administrations—that such a “right” existed.
There are two problems with this suggestion. First, nowhere in the treaty is any such “right” mentioned. Second, pretending there is such a right implies that countries should be able to exercise it and make nuclear fuel because diversions of fissile material from the fuel-making enterprise can be detected early and reliably enough to prevent nuclear bombs from being made.
That’s just not true.
Washington has been in denial about this, giving the equivalent of nuclear hall-passes to nations, one by one. First, in the early 1980s, the United States authorized Japan to separate plutonium from American-origin spent fuel. Then, Washington authorized Euratom nations to do the same and accepted their commercial enrichment of uranium. When it came to countries that had nuclear weapons programs—like India and Pakistan—Washington’s efforts to block their bomb-making were hardly long-lived. In the case of Argentina and Brazil, the United States succeeded in blocking bomb-making but accepted fuel-making.
The dangers of allowing non-weapon states to make nuclear fuel have always been high. In 1946, the leading experts from the Manhattan Project concluded in the Acheson-Lilienthal Report that enriching uranium and recycling plutonium were too central to bomb-making for safeguards ever to protect reliably against diversion of those fissile materials to military use. For those experts, inspecting these activities and the materials they produced—weapons-usable uranium and plutonium—was less than useless, because inspections would draw attention to the dangerous character of these activities while allowing states to engage in them. One could monitor such activities and materials, but it was impossible to detect possible diversions early enough to prevent bombs from being built.
The US Atomic Energy Commission banked on America monopolizing the international market for enriched uranium and keeping the secrets of fuel-making from other nations. Reprocessing and centrifuge enrichment technologies, however, began to spread as early as the 1950s. By the 1970s, America’s monopoly on supply evaporated. By the 1980s, a number of countries were making nuclear fuel, and Washington largely gave up on blocking their efforts.
There’s no reason, however, why we have to make our mistakes hereditary. There was never a consensus while negotiating the NPT that non-weapons member states had a “right” to make nuclear fuel. In fact, diplomats from Great Britain, Sweden, and a few developing nations argued that fuel-making should not be allowed as it was the very thing the treaty was designed to prevent—dangerous bombmaking activities. When they raised this point, they were assured it would be covered later. It never was. Some countries demanded that the treaty recognize their “right” to full access to the “entire fuel cycle,” but their efforts to formalize this demand failed.
The United States has a checkered past with Iran on this topic. It first encouraged Iran to develop peaceful nuclear energy, signing a nuclear cooperation agreement in 1956. Congress did not even bother to review the deal with so much as a hearing. In the 1970s, the Ford administration nearly granted the Shah’s request to reprocess US-origin spent fuel. Then, the Iranian revolution came and along with it, a moment of Iranian nuclear remission. It did not last long.
When Iran picked up its nuclear weapons program again, it leveraged nuclear assistance from Russia, China, and the nuclear black market run by Pakistani weaponeer A.Q. Khan. The George W. Bush White House, shocked at the scope of the program, opposed completion of Iran’s light water power reactor at Bushehr, engaged Iran in negotiations (during which Iran temporarily halted enrichment activities), and successfully initiated an international moratorium on selling fuel-making equipment for a few years. But, frustrated by Iran’s unwillingness to have Russia enrich uranium for it, the United States stumbled into affirming Iran’s “right” to enrich. Ultimately, Washington gave up blocking enrichment, hoping that, with enough international inspections of this activity, it could prevent the worst.
The problem is not how or where Iran is enriching uranium, however, or even how much enriched uranium Iran might have. The problem is that Iran is enriching at all. What inspections alone can prevent is precious little and has been exaggerated for decades. Any country that makes nuclear fuel can break out and make bombs within weeks or months.
It may be too late to block Iran from making bombs, but now is an excellent time to change course on the question of how “peaceful” nuclear fuel-making is. The US administration would do well to keep this in mind when Saudi Arabia and South Korea come knocking on the door seeking their “right” to make nuclear fuel.
At this point, the United States doesn’t need new nuclear deals so much as sound nuclear non-proliferation principles.
Henry Sokolski is founder and executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and the editor of “Nuclear Proliferation’s Next Iteration,” published May 29. He served as deputy for nonproliferation policy in the office of the U.S. secretary of defense from 1989 to 1993.
Sharon Squassoni is a research professor at the Institute for International Science and Technology Policy, Elliott School of International Affairs, at the George Washington University. She has specialized in nuclear nonproliferation, arms control and security policy for three decades, serving in the US government at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the State Department, and the Congressional Research Service.
[This commentary first appeared in the Aug. 15, 2025 edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.]
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