More than two months of on-again, off-again peace talks have made little progress toward settling the U.S. war on Iran. But President Trump has lately claimed a major breakthrough.
“The one guarantee that I have to have is that there will be no nuclear weapons,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with his daughter-in-law Lara Trump on Fox News last month. Iran, he added, has “agreed to that, and it was very interesting.”
Mr. Trump emphasized the point again on Monday. “They’ve already agreed they’re not going to have a nuclear weapon,” he told a New York Post podcast. “That was one of the things they’ve had to agree, they’ve agreed to that. That was the big thing,” he said.
Mr. Trump has said the main reason he went to war on Feb. 28 was to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. An official White House fact sheet lists 74 occasions, dating to 2011, when Mr. Trump said that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon. And when he posted his latest conditions for a deal on social media last month, the first was that “Iran must agree that they will never have a Nuclear Weapon or Bomb.”
But Mr. Trump’s boasts of an Iranian commitment have puzzled nuclear experts. The president appears to be claiming credit for something that is neither new nor, experts say, particularly meaningful.
“It’s not much of a concession,” said Gary Samore, a veteran arms control expert who dealt with Iran as a National Security Council official in the Obama administration.
One reason is that Tehran has forsworn nuclear weapons for more than 50 years, insisting over and over that its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes such as electricity and medicine. Its promises have come in the form of written pledges, verbal statements and even a religious ruling, or fatwa, from its supreme leader.
Another is that such a promise means little on its own. Its only value would come as a first step toward subsequent talks that could establish detailed limits on Iran’s nuclear activities, including its uranium enrichment. “The issue is how the pledge translates into limits on Iran’s enrichment program,” Mr. Samore said.
In fact, Iran’s promise is in the first paragraph of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the United States, under President Barack Obama, and several other world powers that Mr. Trump so often denounces.
“Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire any nuclear weapons,” states the agreement’s preamble of the agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Mr. Trump withdrew from that agreement during his first term, calling it weak and inadequate. Tehran accelerated its nuclear program in response, but continued to insist it was not pursuing atomic weapons.
That position dates back to 1970, when Iran joined an international nonproliferation treaty, which grants members assistance with nuclear technology in return for, among other things, pledges not to develop or acquire nuclear weapons. Iran joined the treaty during the rule of a pro-Western shah who was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic revolution, but the country has remained a party to the agreement.
Iran’s leader has even decreed that Islam itself prohibits the development or use of nuclear weapons. At a 2005 meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran’s government declared that Ali Khamenei, who was Iran’s supreme leader, had issued a fatwa saying that “the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons are forbidden under Islam and that the Islamic Republic of Iran shall never acquire these weapons.”
Many analysts argue that Iran’s promises alone are virtually meaningless and lack credibility.
“An Iranian promise, by itself, is worth very little,” said Daniel Roth, the research director at United Against Nuclear Iran, a nonprofit policy group. “Iran has long maintained that it does not seek nuclear weapons despite a mountain of contrary evidence.”
In 2015, an official International Atomic Energy Agency report concluded that Iran worked on nuclear weapons designs until 2009 before pausing that effort.
An archive of documents stolen by Israeli spies in 2018, for instance, showed Iranian planning for the design and construction of nuclear weapons.
But Mr. Roth said that Mr. Trump’s aggressive approach toward Iran over the past year, which included a round of June 2025 airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities before the current conflict, demonstrates his seriousness about preventing Iran from acquiring a bomb.
In public statements over the past year, Mr. Trump has insisted on “zero enrichment” for Iran, meaning that Tehran must completely surrender its stockpile of nuclear material and dismantle the centrifuges and other equipment needed to refine uranium for use in nuclear weapons.
Iranian officials have publicly rejected that position, insisting they have a sovereign right to pursue nuclear technology.
Asked for clarification about the matter, including what commitment Iran might have made to Mr. Trump, a White House spokesperson had nothing to add to the president’s remarks.
What matters most in any potential agreement with Iran, experts agreed, is what specific limits are placed on Iran’s nuclear program and how they can be enforced.
That is a complex technical matter, and a key reason the Obama-era nuclear deal took more than 18 months to negotiate. The final agreement called for strict monitoring and spot inspections of Iran’s nuclear activities. (Mr. Trump criticized the deal, in large part, because most of its limits were set to expire after 15 years. The Obama administration said that Iran would not accept longer limits, and that the matter could be revisited in future negotiations if necessary.)
For the moment, Mr. Trump’s ambitions are more limited. He is seeking an interim agreement under which Iran would immediately reopen the Strait of Hormuz and make broad commitments about its nuclear program whose details would be hashed out in subsequent negotiations.
Ultimately, guaranteeing that Iran never has a nuclear bomb is an impossible goal, said Robert Einhorn, a former senior State Department arms control official and expert on Iran’s nuclear program.
“In reality, no conceivable negotiated outcome can guarantee that Iran will never acquire nuclear weapons,” he said.
Mr. Einhorn noted that many Iranian officials have publicly suggested over the past year that repeated attacks by the United States and Israel may justify Iran’s abandonment of its past pledges not to obtain nuclear devices.
Given its ample scientific knowledge, hardened underground facilities, and the potential ability to conduct nuclear activity in secret, Iran will always be theoretically capable of going nuclear.
“As long as Iran has the knowledge and resources, it could someday disavow or ignore any legal obligations and go for the bomb, overtly or covertly,” Mr. Einhorn said.
