Iran proposes partnership with UAE, KSA to enrich uranium

Iran has floated the idea of a consortium of Middle Eastern countries — including Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – to enrich uranium, in a effort to overcome US objections to its continued enrichment programme, The Guardian reported on Tuesday.

The proposal is seen as a way of locking Gulf states into supporting Iran's position that it should be allowed to retain enrichment capabilities.

Tehran views the proposal as a concession, since it would be giving neighbouring states access to its technological knowledge and making them stakeholders in the process.

It is not clear if Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, made the proposal in relatively brief three-hour talks with the US in Oman on Sunday, the fourth set of such talks, but the proposal is reportedly circulating in Tehran.

After the talks, Araghchi flew to Dubai where he spoke to the UAE's foreign minister, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan. The UAE currently does not enrich uranium for its own nuclear programme.

The consortium would be based on Iranian facilities with enrichment returned to the 3.67% levels set out in the original 2015 nuclear deal between Tehran and six world powers, which Donald Trump unilaterally ended in 2018.

The US has demanded that Iran ends enrichment and dismantles all its nuclear facilities. But amid divisions in Washington, Trump has not made a final decision on the issue and praised Iran's seriousness in the talks.

The consortium idea was first proposed by former Iranian nuclear negotiator Seyed Hossein Mousavian and Princeton physicist Frank von Hippel long before the current Tehran-Washington talks, in a widely read October 2023 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.