nuclear weapon

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has agreed to work with Saudi Arabia to develop a civilian nuclear program, a watershed moment following a years-long effort to curb the proliferation of nuclear technology in the Middle East.

The announcement comes as President Trump has vowed to continue executing a war against Iran over its own nuclear ambitions. On Wednesday, the president warned he would target a bridge or power plant for every commercial vessel Iran fires upon in the Strait of Hormuz, after earlier this week threatening to strike a new facility Tehran is reportedly building to conceal its continued nuclear work.

The Saudi deal stoked surprise and immediate concern across Washington, where lawmakers are expected to have a vote on the matter, as well as in Israel, itself a nuclear power that has long feared an atomic arms race could grip the region.

A Saudi nuclear program has long been tied to the standoff over Iran’s nuclear work, which successive U.S. administrations have said extends beyond civilian purposes. After Iran struck a nuclear deal with world powers in 2015, Saudi Arabia vowed to match whatever nuclear capabilities Tehran was allowed to keep.

In the decade since, U.S. officials had tried to keep Saudi Arabia from developing its own program, fearing it would fuel nuclear competition across the Middle East. But it became a consistent and central point of negotiation between the two allies.

Both the Trump and Biden administrations ultimately offered to support a limited, monitored program as part of a broader deal to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, hoping that a diplomatic breakthrough would mitigate the risks of an arms race.

But the agreement secured this week left skeptics in Washington and the region unclear what the United States had secured in return.

The deal comes after Trump told reporters this week that the goal of resuming war with Iran was to prevent them from ever obtaining nuclear weapons, a challenge that has vexed the international community since the outset of the century.

U.S. presidents have long sought to prevent Middle Eastern countries from acquiring technologies that could be used to build weapons of mass destruction. The 2003 invasion of Iraq over false claims about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs prompted Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi to abandon his nuclear work. Over the next two decades, the United States and Israel also targeted Syria’s nuclear and chemical weapons programs under Bashar al-Assad.

But Iran’s slow march to nuclear weapons capability, enriching uranium near to weapons-grade with no clear civilian or scientific ends, has prompted other countries in the region to question whether they, too, might need similar capabilities to counterbalance a historic foe. Israel, which views the Islamic Republic and its nuclear program as existential threats, is widely believed to possess its own nuclear weapons.

Hours after the nuclear deal was reported by the Wall Street Journal, the White House was silent on the details and Trump administration officials were left scrambling when asked by lawmakers and reporters for answers.

While traveling in Manila, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters he was aware of the news reports, but deferred to the White House to provide more public information.

When pressed about the risks of such a deal, Rubio said he would not “opine directly on the agreement,” but said the United States “is not going to reach any agreement with any country in the world that leads to the risk of proliferation.”

The White House confirmed the deal Wednesday afternoon.

Back in Washington, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz told members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee that he has not yet seen the agreement with Saudi Arabia.

The deal, which would last 30 years and involve American firms developing the program, is expected to be submitted for review to Congress. Lawmakers will consider the deal as they grow increasingly uneasy about the Trump administration’s handling of an expanding Iran war, which Trump and Israel launched, arguing for the need to wipe out Tehran’s capabilities to build nuclear weapons.

As the war enters its fifth month, Trump has continued to defend the military efforts and has dismissed the idea that war is unpopular among Americans as they feel the economic effects.

“Americans aren’t against the war,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday. “Americans don’t want high gasoline prices but they’re not against the war.”

Trump’s remarks were made as he traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware to attend a dignified transfer of U.S. service members killed in the war. Asked what he would say to the families who lost their loved ones, Trump said he’d tell them they’re loved.

“All I’m going to say is, we love you. We love your child, and that’s what they are to them. They’re their children. There’s no games, no nothing,” Trump said. “That’s their child, and all you can do is throw out your heart.”

Earlier in the day, Trump said the United States will destroy a bridge or power plant in Iran each time it shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial waterway for the global energy supply.

Trump’s threat to target bridges and power plants would mark yet another escalation that could affect civilians in the region.

Hasan Ghashghavi, a member of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, denied Trump’s claim on Tuesday that Iran was requesting negotiations, saying in a statement on X that it was “in no way consistent with the facts.”

“It seems that Trump, in order to extricate himself from the quagmire he’s trapped in, should seek better paths,” he wrote. “Repetitive lies no longer even bring about short-term market relief.”

Times staff writer Nabih Bulos in Beirut contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — President Trump said Sunday that the United States and Iran have reached a framework agreement to end the war in the Middle East, a breakthrough in months of negotiations aimed at ending the conflict.

The deal, described by diplomats as a memorandum of understanding, commits Tehran to forgo the development or acquisition of nuclear weapons in exchange for helping reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and the paced release of its assets frozen overseas, upon the signing of the deal Friday in Switzerland.

Trump said he has also authorized “the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade” on Iranian imports.

“Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” Trump wrote in a social media post Sunday evening. It was the president’s 80th birthday.

The full details of the agreement have not been released. Many details — including how Tehran would give up, destroy or dilute its fissile material, or whether Iran would continue treating the international strait as its sovereign waters — will continue to be negotiated in the coming days.

Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said Sunday that mediators are planning to hold a series of meetings this week to “lay the foundation for the technical talks and the official signing ceremony.”

“We would like to thank the United States of America and the Islamic Republic of Iran for their commitment to finding a diplomatic solution to the conflict,” Sharif wrote in a post on X.

The Associated Press reported that negotiations on outstanding issues like Iran’s nuclear program would continue over the next 60 days, according to two senior Pakistani officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Vice President JD Vance told Fox News that the White House is “still figuring out the logistics” on whether he or Trump will attend the signing ceremony.

“What we know is that we have a lot of work to do, but a very big win for the American people tonight,” Vance said.”We are just going to keep on working at it, keep on driving energy prices down, keep on ensuring that region of the world is less than a basket case and finally, and most importantly, celebrate, that we can say with confidence Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.”

Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Kazem Gharibabadi, confirmed the agreement on state television but said Iran would not start implementing it until it was signed on Friday. He said the deal followed over 14 hours of talks in Tehran with a representative from Qatar, another mediator.

Iranian state TV showed a banner asserting: “US was forced to sign an agreement to end the war.”

Iran’s commitment to refrain from pursuing nuclear weapons would simply repeat a vow Iran has made several times before, including in its signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its nuclear deal brokered with international powers under the Obama administration over 10 years ago.

Iran has 972 pounds of uranium that is enriched up to 60% purity, a short, technical step from weapons-grade levels of 90%, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Under the 2015 international agreement with Iran abandoned by the first Trump administration, Iran’s uranium enrichment was capped at less than 4%, monitored by IAEA inspectors.

The vagueness of the new agreement, the demand for further negotiations to flesh out its details, and the pacing of sanctions relief for Iran are all likely to draw criticism of the president, who launched his political career in 2015 by attacking President Obama’s newly signed nuclear deal as a historically bad agreement.

That deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, followed two years of painstaking negotiations that were predicated on a similar, yet more detailed framework, called the JCPOA.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a Sunday morning interview on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that the the difference between the JCPOA and how the Trump administration is handling negotiations is the “threat of military force.”

“The huge difference is we did this from a position of strength,” Hegseth said. “That military might will stay as long as necessary.”

And, as in 2015, Israeli leadership across the political aisle remains deeply skeptical of the agreement, pronouncing they will not be bound by a deal to which they are not a party.

In a phone interview with the New York Times on Sunday afternoon, Trump called Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, a “very difficult guy.”

“To be honest with you, he should be very thankful to us for doing this. Because if Iran had a nuclear weapon, Israel wouldn’t be around for two hours,” Trump said.

Since the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran that started the war Feb. 28, there have been 3,468 confirmed deaths in Iran, according to independent monitors. In addition, 13 U.S. service members have been killed, and the Israeli war with Hezbollah has killed 2,679 in Lebanon as well as 23 Israelis, including eight civilians.

President Trump, it’s well known, is into gold. Every day brings new evidence that he’s thoroughly enjoying the “golden age” he pronounced in his inaugural address — as few other Americans are — with stock trades, crypto profiteering and much more, even a new taxpayer-financed slush fund to reward his allies.

As for me, I’ve gone into silver. That is, I constantly look for the silver linings in Trump’s heinous acts.

One silver lining, of course, is his cratering job-approval numbers in the polls, especially among the young and Latino voters who made his reelection possible. But here’s another: By his humiliating failure to bring Iran to heel, nearly three months after starting a war that he said would last weeks at most, Trump has brought new, more positive attention to what he again this week derided as “Barack Hussein Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.” (The emphasis on “Hussein” is Trump’s, always.)

The president, along with his Republican cheerleaders, counts his first-term abrogation of the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as a signature achievement. This week, yet again, he falsely claimed that had he not done so, Iran would have a nuclear weapon. In fact, his action in 2018 taking the United States out of the multinational deal subsequently led to Iran’s rebuilding of its nuclear program, the emboldening of the Iranian hard-liners now in power and the Middle East morass in which the United States is now mired.

That quagmire has left Trump seeming desperate for a deal — almost certainly a worse deal than the one Obama struck. Call it JCPOA Lite.

If he were able to get Iran’s sign-off on the sort of detailed, restrictive agreement that Obama and other world leaders won 11 years ago, he’d be trumpeting himself as the world’s greatest dealmaker. (He does that anyway, but his record proves otherwise.) Instead, by his own failure to date, Trump has invited reconsideration of the very agreement he decried as the “worst deal ever” on his march to election and reelection.

No sooner was the 2015 deal signed than Trump and Republicans succeeded in defining it as a giveaway to Iran that assured, not hindered, its development of a nuclear weapon to threaten Israel and the world. Opponents condemned the agreement for not addressing Iran’s other threats, notably its support for militant proxies throughout the Mideast. Some Democrats, notably Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, were among the foes. Other Democrats, cowed by opposition to the agreement by Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government and pro-Israel lobbyists, were all but mute in the pact’s defense.

Now some Democrats are belatedly finding their voice (and, post-Gaza, some willingness to defy Israel). Along with nonpartisan experts, those Democrats are drawing comparisons between the 2015 agreement, flawed yet successful, and Trump’s promised yet ever-elusive alternative. What’s ironic for Israel and Netanyahu, still implacably against negotiating with Tehran, is that they could end up, under Trump, with a nuclear deal that gives Iran more leeway than the hated JCPOA did.

As Americans are being reminded, the 2015 deal wasn’t just between Iran and Obama, as Trump has long suggested; other signatories were China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany and the 27-nation European Union. Reconstituting that group would be all but impossible today.

The pact’s 159 highly technical pages and five appendices — a far cry from the short-lived one-pager that Trump officials teased earlier this month — required Iran for 15 years to limit its nuclear program to civilian purposes, forfeit more than 97% of its enriched uranium and submit to intrusive monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure compliance. In return, Iran gradually got relief from some, but not all, international economic sanctions and access to Iranian funds that were frozen after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Presumably, after 15 years, the agreement would have been extended somehow.

By all accounts, including those of Trump’s first-term intelligence and national security officials, Iran was complying when he abandoned the deal. Its “breakout time” for building a nuclear weapon was about a year — time enough for the world to intervene — instead of two to three months. Now, though the president boasts he barred Iran from having that weapon by breaking the Iran nuclear deal, he incessantly tells Americans that he went to war against Iran on Feb. 28 because it was on the brink of a bomb — never mind that he also said he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program last summer, a program that was in a well-monitored box until he first took office.

If you’re confused, you’re paying attention.

A month ago, Trump posted online that he was close to a deal “FAR BETTER” than the 2015 accord. “I am under no pressure whatsoever, ⁠although, it will all happen, relatively quickly!” To several reporters, he suggested he in fact had a deal and that Iran had agreed both to suspend its nuclear activities and to forfeit all of its enriched, near-weapons-grade uranium.

Preposterous claims, given Iran’s current government, and Tehran promptly denied them. It was a sign of Trump’s squandered credibility that few, if anyone, believed him in the first place. Nor have folks believed his more recent talk of imminent success; oil markets, too, have learned not to trust the president, as prices at the pumps attest.

On Tuesday at the White House, amid a noisy tour of the billion-dollar-ballroom construction site, Trump told reporters he’d been “an hour away” from striking Iran again that very day but Mideast leaders asked for more time for negotiations.

Don’t hold your breath.

But for the tragic consequences, Obama might be enjoying some justifiable schadenfreude about Trump’s travails.

“We pulled it off without firing a missile. We got 97% of the enriched uranium out,” he told Stephen Colbert in an interview last week. Both U.S. and Israeli intelligence agreed that Iran was abiding by the nuclear limits, Obama added, “and we didn’t have to kill a whole bunch of people or shut down the Strait of Hormuz.”

That sure doesn’t sound like the “worst deal ever.” It wasn’t.

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