The Biden administration had spent a year trying to revive the landmark nuclear deal with Iran, agreed in 2015 under President Barack Obama and dissolved in 2018 during President Donald Trump's time in office. Now talks have once more been derailed - this time by Russian demands. The new requests that have been called "irrelevant" come at a time when the U.S. reportedly would like to tap Iran for oil deliveries after embargoing Russia over the invasion of Ukraine. For that, the nuclear deal would have to be back on the table, however.
After the limit of a 300 kg Iranian uranium stockpile agreed upon in the JCPOA deal was abandoned in 2018, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has reported significant growth in Iran's stockpiles of nuclear material. Even though Tehran has insisted that its nuclear program is for purely peaceful purposes, its levels of enriched uranium are now almost ten times the limit agreed in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
The IAEA has recently also criticized Iranian explanations for nuclear material stored at an undeclared site, stating that they are not credible. Iran would only have been allowed to produce 300 kg of enriched uranium in the UF6 compound for a period of 15 years under the terms of the JCPOA. Its low-enriched uranium stockpile declined drastically after it was agreed, falling from 8,300 kg to 200 kg, according to IAEA data published by Bloomberg. In mid-2017, it even fell as low as 80 kg. Trump took the U.S. out of the nuclear deal in May 2018, signing a Presidential Memorandum, ordering harsher sanctions to be reinstated.
