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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28907 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026

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If you believe the Omani negotiator, Iran was willing to give up their stockpile and enrichment in exchange for sanction relief; that was likely the point of building the stockpile in the first place. Once the US tried to regime change them, the calculations shifted.

All the sources I have seen say the opposite - the negotiations leading up to military action was basically the US begging Iran to just give up on the nukes and Iran saying, "Nope, I'd rather die."

Laurence Norman, WSJ reporter in Germany, says, "My understanding comes from non-U.S. officials close to the talks as well as what Washington has said. This is what we have from 3 people."

Iran came to Geneva on Thursday with a draft text of a few pages as it had been asked. It did not permit the U.S. or others to keep the text. It was planning to do so Monday at the technical talks. But they talked through what was in it. But the draft text was not the key text

Attached to the text was a single piece of paper, which Iran described as its 10 year nuclear plan. The text was based around the idea that as Iran's enrichment needs expanded, it's enrichment should be permitted to expand. The paper set out an ambitious set of targets or expanding its civilian nuclear program. The new version of the Khondab reactor (formerly known as Arak heavy water reactor) would be completed. A number of other long-planned, never-built research and power reactors would be put into operation.

In order to fuel those supplies, Iran would need to run 30 cascades of IR-6 advanced centrifuges Tehran said. That's more than 5,000 advanced centrifuges. Iran would need to be able to enrich up to 20% to meet the demands. That is what Iran was proposing.

Let's compare that for a moment to JCPOA. For the first decade under that accord, Iran was permitted around 6.000 IR-1 basic centrifuges. For 15 years, its enrichment purity cap was 3.67%. In other words, Iran was saying the enrichment deal shld be weaker than the Iran deal.

I don't know why there are two such diametrically opposed narratives. I don't think there is any reason to believe the WSJ, which tends to be center left in the US, would try to run propaganda for Trump. I don't know what reason Oman might have to lie, except perhaps to increase their importance by making it sound like negotiations were going well.

Given Iran's past behavior regarding nuclear enrichment, I tend to believe the WSJ story as it is more in line with their past and present actions.

They agreed to 3.67% enrichment and then the US ripped it up; thus, ask for more next time. If you look at a graph of SWUs (ie effort/time input) versus enrichment percentage, it's not that huge a leap; the first few percentage points of enrichment are the hardest.

No, they didn't. The US offered to supply enriched uranium to Iran that is suitable for civilian use, a situaon similar to the UAE and Korea (two other nations that for various reasons have forfeited their ability to enrich fuel but still employ civilian nuclear programs). Iran rejected this - they want to be able to enrich their own.

Oman said, "Zero accumulation" which might be a trick of language. There is 0 accumulation if it all goes back into centrifuges. According to three other sources Iran had a 10 year nuclear enrichment plan which included:

  • Completing the Khondab reactor (formerly known as Arak heavy water reactor)
  • A number of other long-planned, never-built research and power reactors would be put into operation.
  • Tehran demanded the ability to run 30 cascades of IR-6 advanced centrifuges and enrich up to 20% to support their 10 year plan.

Everything keeps coming back to the idea that Iran completely misread how serious Washington is being when they say, "No Nuclear Enrichment."

If they just wanted to get out of the sanctions surely they could have at any point just said "hey, actually we would like to be more like Saudi Arabia, we will stop funding proxies and be chill" and any of the previous presidents would have tripped over themselves to get this deal.

Past precedent suggests that unilateral disarmament ends in your regime winding up like that of Gaddafi, not Saudi Arabia.

Which shows that they value having proxies over having nuclear weapons. Ultimately, trying to get nukes has been more trouble than it's worth for the Iranians; Israel can't invade them, the US pre-Trump wasn't interested, and it just led to a whole bunch of crippling sanctions. Khameini issued a fatwa against nuclear weapons which, presumably, meant something in a very fundamentalist society.

The sanctions surely would have come about in response to the proxy funding in some non-nuclear counterfactual. Maybe lesser sanctions. At the end of the day the idea that Iran would have been satisfied with being a normal country that gets rich with its combination of obviously smart population and natural resources is complicated by the fact that this option was always on the table and they turned it down. The regime has ambitions in the region, and lofty ones. And once you have lofty ambitions counter to a nuclear power's wishes then you need nukes or you fail somewhere in the escalation chain above where sanctions are involved. Needing to at least be able to threaten to have nukes is a a necessary component of any plan to accomplish their regional objectives, no way around it.

Wasn't that the point of the JCPOA? You can point out it was not indefinite, but given millennarian Shia expectations, it could plausibly be renewed without too much ideological handwringing.

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