2 wars later, US-Iran nuclear diplomacy returns to square one

After two wars in the space of a year, diplomacy over Iran’s nuclear programme has come back to much the same place it was before the fighting began.

The memorandum of understanding signed by US President Donald Trump and his Iranian counterpart, Masoud Pezeshkian, on Wednesday sets up talks that non-proliferation experts said would largely resume the US-Iran diplomatic track Washington broke off in February.

That track had built on Oman-mediated talks – part of a wider Gulf diplomatic effort that also involved Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – in which both sides had been discussing the outlines of a possible nuclear framework.

But this earlier diplomacy was overtaken last June by Israel’s 12-day air war against Iran, which expanded when the US struck Iran’s main enrichment sites and tunnel entrances used to store enriched uranium.

The attacks badly damaged Iran’s enrichment capacity but did not resolve the central proliferation concern: the location, status and future disposition of its near-weapons-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU) stockpile.

  

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