Trump Seeks to Abolish Iran’s Atomic Stockpile, a Problem He Helped Cre...

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Trump Seeks to Abolish Iran’s Atomic Stockpile, a Problem He Helped Create

President Trump withdrew from the Obama-era nuclear accord in 2018, saying it was the worst deal ever. But Iran responded with an enrichment spree that haunts the negotiations to this day.

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In February in preparation for a possible war with the United States, Iran moved missile launchers into positions within striking distance of Israeli and American military forces.

Credit...

Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

By

William J. Broad

and

David E. Sanger

William J. Broad and David E. Sanger have written about the Iranian nuclear program for more than two decades.

April 25, 2026,

5:02 a.m. ET

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As nuclear talks restart in Pakistan this weekend, President Trump will confront the complicated legacy of his own decision, eight years ago, to cancel what he has called “a horrible, one-sided deal.”

That Obama-era agreement suffered from flaws and omissions. It would have expired after 15 years, leaving Iran free after 2030 to make as much nuclear fuel as it wanted. But once Mr. Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, the Iranians went on an enrichment spree much sooner, leaving them closer to a bomb than ever before.

Now, Mr. Trump’s negotiators are dealing with the consequences of that decision, which he made over the objections of many of his national security advisers at the time.

Much recent attention has focused on Iran’s half ton of uranium that has been enriched to a level just shy of what is typically used in atom bombs. The majority of it is thought to be buried in a tunnel complex that Mr. Trump bombed last June. But those 970 pounds of potential bomb fuel represent only a small fraction of the problem.

Today, international inspectors say, Iran has a total of 11 tons of uranium, at various enrichment levels. With further purification, that is enough to build up to 100 nuclear weapons — more than the

estimated size

of Israel’s arsenal.

Virtually all of that cache accumulated in the years after Mr. Trump abandoned the Obama-era deal. That is because Tehran

lived up to its pledge

to ship to Russia 12.5 tons of its overall stockpile, about 97 percent. Iran’s weapon designers were left with too little nuclear fuel to build a single bomb.

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