Iran has floated the idea of a consortium of Middle Eastern countries – including Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – to enrich uranium, in a effort to overcome US objections to its continued enrichment programme.
The proposal is seen as a way of locking Gulf states into supporting Iran’s position that it should be allowed to retain enrichment capabilities.
Tehran views the proposal as a concession, since it would be giving neighbouring states access to its technological knowledge and making them stakeholders in the process.
It is not clear if Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, made the proposal in relatively brief three-hour talks with the US in Oman on Sunday, the fourth set of such talks, but the proposal is reportedly circulating in Tehran.
After the talks, Araghchi flew to Dubai where he spoke to the UAE’s foreign minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The UAE currently does not enrich uranium for its own nuclear programme.
The consortium would be based on Iranian facilities with enrichment returned to the 3.67% levels set out in the original 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and six world powers, which Donald Trump unilaterally ended in 2018.
The US has demanded that Iran ends enrichment and dismantles all its nuclear facilities. But amid divisions in Washington, Trump has not made a final decision on the issue and praised Iran’s seriousness in the talks.
The consortium idea was first proposed by former Iranian nuclear negotiator Seyed Hossein Mousavian and Princeton physicist Frank von Hippel long before the current Tehran-Washington talks, in a widely read October 2023 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Under the consortium, the Saudis and UAE would be shareholders and funders, and would gain access to Iranian technology. The involvement of the Gulf states could be seen as an extra insurance that Iran’s nuclear programme was for entirely civil purposes and not the pathway to building a bomb, as Israel alleges.
If the Saudis and UAE were permitted to send engineers to Iran, an extra form of visibility about the programme would become possible, leaving the international community less reliant solely on the work of the UN nuclear inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Iran gradually moved away from the levels of enrichment and stockpile limits set out in the original 2015 deal, blaming Trump for leaving the nuclear deal. Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Majid Takht-Ravanchi, said: “For a limited period of time, we can accept a series of restrictions on the level and volume of enrichment.”
The US originally gave the impression that it needs an agreement with Iran within two months of the talks starting but, as the technicalities of any agreement become more complex, it is possible the talks will be allowed to drag on through the summer.
Iran currently enriches uranium to 60% purity – far above the 3.67% limit set in the 2015 deal, and a short technical step from 90% needed for weapons-grade material. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said these uranium enrichment level are far higher than necessary for civilian uses.
In what may have been a reference to the Iranian proposal Omani foreign minister, Badr Al Busaidi, referred to “useful and original ideas reflecting a shared wish to reach an honourable agreement”.
The UAE operates a civil nuclear power plant named Barakah, located west of Abu Dhabi. It is the first nuclear power plant in the Arab world to be fully operational, with all four reactors now online, and should be capable of producing a quarter of the UAE’s electricity needs.
