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Whenever the United States and Israel stop bombing Iran, they will have to figure out how to deal with the remnants of the country's nuclear program. NPR's Michele Kelemen reports it may be even harder now to talk Iran out of uranium enrichment.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is sounding confident about his ability to deal with the 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium that Iran is widely believed to possess.
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PETE HEGSETH: We have a range of options, up to and including Iran deciding that they will give those up, which, of course, we would welcome. They weren't willing to do in negotiations.
KELEMEN: Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told "Face The Nation" with Margaret Brennan on CBS that they were talking about this before the U.S. and Israel started bombing his country.
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ABBAS ARAGHCHI: I offered, actually, that we are ready to dilute those enriched material or down-blend them, as they say, into lower percentage. So that was, you know, a big offer, a big concession.
KELEMEN: Trump says Iran wants a deal now, though Araghchi denies there are any talks.
KELSEY DAVENPORT: At the end of this conflict, the Iranian proliferation risk will remain.
KELEMEN: That's Kelsey Davenport, who's with the Arms Control Association. She supports nuclear diplomacy with Iran and says the U.S. and Israel can't bomb away Iranian know-how.
DAVENPORT: That's a recipe for repeated strikes - mowing-the-grass strategy, where the U.S. has to go in every few years if there's a risk that, you know, Iran has resumed activities that the U.S. views as troubling.
KELEMEN: There is a way to break this cycle, says David Albright, author of a book called "Iran's Perilous Pursuit Of Nuclear Weapons."
DAVID ALBRIGHT: Their strategy and announced goal should be that Iran agrees to give up its enrichment program and its nuclear weaponization program and accept intrusive verification as part of a ceasefire deal.
KELEMEN: Albright says he hasn't heard anything coherent from this administration. The White House told NPR it would be, quote, "foolish" to broadcast every potential mechanism to the Iranian regime, adding for now, the U.S. military continues to destroy Iran's dreams of owning a nuclear weapon. Still, Albright thinks Trump's lead negotiators would benefit from attending one of the nuclear nonproliferation seminars by his think tank, the Institute for Science and International Security.
ALBRIGHT: You know, it'd be nice if competent people were negotiating with the Iranians, but I don't think it would matter.
KELEMEN: Because for years, he says, Iran has insisted on a right to enrichment, and Trump administration officials called that a redline. Albright agrees with them on that and says a change in regime could be an answer to this problem. But Kelsey Davenport says regime change does not necessarily alter the proliferation risks.
DAVENPORT: Even a liberal democracy feeling weak post-conflict, feeling threatened by its neighbors could make the decision to develop nuclear weapons.
KELEMEN: But Albright looks to precedent. A change in leadership in South Africa a few decades ago led to the dismantlement of its nuclear weapons program, and Syria's new leaders are now opening up to the International Atomic Energy Agency. If the Islamic republic does survive this war, he fears it could reconstitute its program.
ALBRIGHT: I don't think it would do it very quickly. I think it's severely traumatized from the June war, and then this war only makes it worse.
KELEMEN: Albright says there's another danger. If the regime collapses into chaos, the U.S. may have to take big risks to safeguard the nuclear material.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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