US Confident Iran Nuclear Deal Will Be Signed Soon, Officials Say

The US is confident that a deal to end the war with Iran will be signed in the next few days, a senior Trump administration official has said.

While officials say the deal will also lead to the destruction and removal of Iran's enriched uranium stockpiles - a key component of nuclear weapons - the technical details are still being worked out.

If and when an agreement is signed, it will likely be judged against the 2015 nuclear agreement negotiated by the Obama administration and other nations, which was abandoned by Trump during his first term.

Uranium is a naturally occurring radioactive element. It contains special properties that can be used to fuel nuclear power plants, but also help develop nuclear weapons.

However, it needs to be "enriched" first, a process that involves increasing the concentration of uranium-235 isotope - the essential component of nuclear fuel.

He reiterated this in an interview with NBC on 7 June, saying: "If we make a deal now we're friendly, we'll all go together. It'll be our equipment. We'll take it out and destroy it, whether it's onsite or whether we take it offsite."

"The number one issue that was running at that time was whether Iran was going to go for building a nuclear weapon", former JCPOA lead negotiator Baroness Ashton told BBC Verify.

When it was introduced, the Obama administration declared that the JCPOA would prevent Iran from building a secret nuclear programme and that Tehran had agreed to "extraordinary and robust monitoring, verification, and inspection".

Low-enriched uranium - typically 3-5% purity - is enough to produce reactor fuel required for a nuclear power station, but weapons-grade uranium needs to be at least 90% enriched.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear watchdog, reported that Iran was complying with the agreement until the US withdrew from it in 2018.

"Any move to nuclear weapons, any deviation from the JCPOA's terms would have been detected," Davenport told BBC Verify, noting that both the IAEA and US intelligence repeatedly assessed Iran was complying.

However, when President Trump announced the US withdrawal from the agreement in May 2018, he called it a "horrible, one-side deal that should never, ever have been made".

He said it failed to address Iran's ballistic missile programme, that the inspection requirements lacked mechanisms "to prevent, detect, and punish cheating" and that Israeli intelligence showed Tehran's "history of pursuing nuclear weapons".

"All of these issues were completely pushed to the sidelines, completely deprioritised and not included in the arrangement", he told BBC Verify.

"There was always a criticism that we should have covered all kind of things. But the critical question was, 'Could we prevent any fear that Iran was going to build a nuclear weapon?' And we did that."

"There was plenty of opportunity afterwards to talk about other issues, ballistic missiles, drones etc. And indeed the Trump administration in its first term could have done that," she adds.

"If President Trump felt that the deal was inadequate, then the answer was to build on it, not to rip it up."

"It was always made explicit in the deal that the terms of the deal would expire… The sunset clauses in effect nullify their effectiveness," he argues.

Davenport says that because some limits on the uranium enrichment level and stockpile size were only set for 15 years, "by January 2031, Iran could theoretically expand its enrichment programme".

But many other features were permanent, including IAEA safeguards, she said, adding: "There was still a whole host of other provisions that would have provided assurance that any move in that direction [towards a nuclear weapon] would have been quickly detected".

"If you sanction someone because they're doing some behaviour and they change the behaviour, then by definition the sanction cannot stay."

The US and Israel attacked Iran's facilities in June 2025, which American officials said significantly set back the prospect of Tehran building a nuclear weapon.

The head of the IAEA, Rafael Grossi, told the Associated Press in April that the majority of Iran's highly enriched uranium (roughly 200kg; 440lbs) was likely located in underground tunnels at its Isfahan nuclear complex, about 273 miles (440km) south of Tehran.

"We haven't been able to inspect or to reject that the material is there and that the seals - the IAEA seals - remain there," he said.

However, Davenport also points out that Iran's nuclear programme is very different from the one negotiators faced in 2015 - due to the apparent destruction of most of its enrichment capacities - making it hard to draw direct comparison with the JCPOA.

Olidort believes the US is negotiating from a position a strength and does not see a deal being weaker than the JCPOA.

Iran "is in a much more weakened state from... its capabilities perspectives, but also the state of different proxies in the region".

While the details of any agreement remain unclear, Baroness Ashton argues that military pressure alone is unlikely to secure a lasting settlement.

"All I can say is in my experience, the way that negotiations work is that people have to feel that they've got enough to make it worthwhile participating in that negotiation".