Iran: The Eternal Negotiation, While the Nuclear Threshold Is Breached

By Samir al-Taqi

How much time remains before Iran crosses the nuclear threshold and becomes a nuclear state?

Estimates by prominent American experts suggest that if Iran can neutralize the United States and keep the facilities of its nuclear program beyond the reach of American strikes, it would need only a few months to reach the stage of “weapons-grade uranium,” and between one and three years to complete a bomb and acquire the means to deliver it.

And yet these precise figures do not seem sufficient, because they grant a false sense of certainty—and presume, implicitly, that nuclear time can still be measured in technical terms.

From another angle, and judging by what Iran’s own strategists publish, economic calculations, sanctions, and destruction are no longer the rulers of Tehran’s foremost concern. The essential question has become the restoration of the regime’s international and regional deterrence. Nuclear time, in other words, has become political time more than technical time.

Developing certain components may take three years, but the decision to place them on the strategic table may require only hours. At that moment the game is complete, and the American military success turns into a grave intelligence and strategic failure.

The recent war showed that destroying technology, facilities, or supply chains is no longer enough. Tunnels, and the internationalization of knowledge networks and production chains, have made military strikes necessary—but utterly insufficient.

The dilemma of uncertainty—the need for inspection, intelligence, and verification—has become far more important than merely demolishing facilities or assassinating one scientist or another. The program has become part of the equation of the regime’s survival, not merely a set of technical capabilities, an economic necessity, or an instrument of strategic deterrence.

A final agreement, as Trump conceives it, would entail verification and inspection mechanisms that strip Iran of its capacity to extort the international community at the negotiating table. Eternal negotiation, by contrast, grants Iran the ambiguity it needs and the absence of inspection—providing deterrence without the cost of sanctions, while the international community flounders before a chronic dilemma: between possessing the weapon and not actually possessing it.

The question is no longer whether the program will be one year or three years away from producing a bomb. It is: do we still know where it stands? And so the current American objective becomes the management of uncertainty.

In this situation, transparency is no legal luxury but a strategic resource for verification—no less vital than military deterrence.

As the war demonstrated, time is no longer bound to the nuclear program alone, but to oil markets, investment, supply chains, and global inflation. Nuclear time thus becomes a strategic commodity: the United States seeks to buy it, Iran seeks to invest it, and the markets work to price it.

Military pressure and the absence of effective inspection have undermined the verification system, turning the years the West thought it had gained into years of strategic ignorance. For an ambiguous nuclear program is far more dangerous, even if it is slower. Every estimate of time is, in essence, an estimate of the level of knowledge and verification available—not of the level of technical progress alone.

And so the question that will determine the future of the Middle East changes. The era of overwhelming military force is over; the heart of the calculation now lies in managing knowledge, guaranteeing transparency, and reducing uncertainty.

By the estimates of these American experts, Iran has crossed the nuclear threshold in its familiar sense, but does not yet possess the bomb. It may well wish to remain between these two limits through the game of ambiguity and eternal negotiation.

But these two estimates conceal more than they reveal. Iran’s nuclear program has become part of the structure of power in the Islamic Republic: it furnishes a negotiating card, feeds a sense of immunity from any reckoning, and creates a deterrent ambiguity. It cannot, therefore, be understood through the logic of physics alone. It is a political project by nuclear means.

While the International Atomic Energy Agency points to mounting difficulties in accessing and verifying certain sites, and while the fate of portions of the material and facilities remains in dispute, the question is no longer how long Iran needs to build a bomb. It is: does Iran see any interest in concluding the “Islamabad” agreements—with the monitoring, inspection, and verification they would entail—that would strip away its negotiating cards and sever the root of its regional extortion? Ambiguity, by contrast, lets it recover the strategic deterrence anchored in its nuclear program.

Yet this situation is neither stable nor sustainable indefinitely. The Iranian formula could collapse at any moment. The instant Iran concludes that diplomacy no longer affords it the margin it requires, the decision to weaponize becomes more attractive. At that point the program is no longer a project of prestige, but a last insurance policy.

There are many possible futures, the likeliest being eternal negotiation, advanced enrichment, limited cooperation with inspectors, mutual threats, and intermittent talks. Such a state of affairs allows Iran to improve its position, Washington to avoid a wide war, the Europeans to keep talking about diplomacy, and the markets to coexist, uneasily, with the danger.

It is a fragile balance. In a climate of little trust and many events, the Middle East faces a crisis far larger than Hormuz and enrichment. It stands before a crisis of regional strategic deterrence—conventional and nuclear alike—that forces the region’s states to recalculate. American guarantees, meanwhile, face their harshest and most dangerous test, even as Iran tries to transform the Gulf from an arena of conventional tension into a space of multilateral deterrence.

At this degree of regional uncertainty, a policy built on sanctions and strikes alone will not suffice, nor will a diplomacy built on general promises. What is required is a shrewder equation: delay the capability, preserve inspection, and offer a political exit that prevents Iran from regarding the bomb as its only guarantee. Verification is not a technical detail; it is the first line of defense.

Iran has not yet become a declared nuclear state, but it has come close enough to render the old question inadequate. The danger is no longer merely that the region wakes one morning to an Iranian bomb test, but that the United States spends years believing it is monitoring a program that can be contained—only to discover that the program has slipped ahead of it, into the shadows.

The future of the Iranian nuclear program will be decided neither in the laboratories alone, nor in the military command rooms alone, but in the distance that separates fear from calculation. As long as Tehran sees the nuclear threshold as a greater asset than the bomb, ambiguity will remain master of the situation.

But if survival itself comes under threat, the nuclear threshold may turn into a new door of dangers. Then the question will no longer be whether Iran needs one year or three. It will be: why did we not know it had crossed until it was too late? Article link https://www.annahar.com/articles/annahar-writers/324858/%D8%A5%D9%8A%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%81%D8%A7%D9%88%D8%B6%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D8%A8%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D9%81%D9%8A%D9%85%D8%A7-%D8%AA%D8%AE%D8%AA%D8%B1%D9%82-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%AA%D8%A8%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%86%D9%88%D9%88%D9%8A%D8%A9