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Custody, Not Compliance: The Contest over Iran’s Enriched Uranium and the Future of Peaceful Nuclear Rights under the NPT
Tahir Azad
ANALYSIS SERIES
Analysis//0003/April/2026/London-Dialogue. 20 April 2026
On 19 April 2026, regional and American diplomatic sources confirmed that Iran had agreed in principle to surrender its stockpile of highly enriched uranium but had refused to hand the material to the United States. Tehran’s preferred custodians are either the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or Russia, which has publicly offered to take the material. Washington, in turn, insists upon participation in the physical removal. This seemingly narrow disagreement is, in fact, the central unresolved issue of a conflict that began with joint American–Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear sites on 28 February 2026 and has since moved through marathon mediated talks in Islamabad, a naval blockade at the Strait of Hormuz, and a fragile two-week ceasefire due to expire on 21 April.
The Trump administration’s departure from earlier non-proliferation frameworks is stark. Where the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) relied upon intrusive IAEA monitoring and enrichment caps, the current American proposal demands a twenty-year enrichment moratorium and the physical removal of approximately 440 kilograms of 60 per cent enriched uranium from Iranian soil. The argument is no longer over whether Iran complies with non-proliferation rules. It is over who takes custody of the fissile material.
This article evaluates that pivot, examines Iran’s position as an NPT signatory invoking its right to peaceful nuclear energy, sets it against the asymmetry created by Israel’s undeclared arsenal, and asks whether either a Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction or extended deterrence arrangements with Russia or China could stabilise what has become the most dangerous proliferation crisis since the early 2000s.
The Technical Inventory
The IAEA’s September 2025 verification report documented that, as of 13 June 2025, Iran possessed 6,024.4 kg of uranium enriched up to 5 per cent, 184.1 kg enriched up to 20 per cent, and 440.9 kg enriched up to 60 per cent U-235, the latter representing the first stockpile of near-weapons-grade material ever produced by a non-nuclear-weapon state party to the NPT. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi estimated that this 60 per cent stockpile could, if further enriched, yield fissile material for roughly ten nuclear warheads.
The technical implication, set out by the Washington-based Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, is unsettling. The separative work required to convert 440 kilograms of 60 per cent material to 90 per cent weapons-grade is approximately 564 separative work units, compared with the 55,330 SWU already expended in reaching 60 per cent. In other words, about 99 per cent of the enrichment work for a small arsenal has already been completed. A single cascade of 175 IR-6 centrifuges could, theoretically, produce enough weapons-grade material for one warhead every twenty-five days.
This combination of high stockpile concentration and residual enrichment capacity, together with the suspension of IAEA inspections following the June 2025 Israeli–American strikes, underwrites Washington’s anxiety. However, capability must be distinguished from intent. Iran has neither tested a nuclear device nor renounced its NPT commitments. Its declared doctrinal position, repeatedly articulated by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei through a fatwa first issued in 2003, remains that the weaponisation of nuclear technology is religiously prohibited.
From Compliance to Custody: Washington’s Strategic Pivot
The architecture of the 2015 JCPOA, negotiated under the Obama administration, relied upon verification rather than dispossession. Iran capped enrichment at 3.67 per cent, limited its stockpile to 300 kilograms, dismantled roughly two-thirds of its installed centrifuges, and accepted the Additional Protocol granting IAEA inspectors short-notice access to declared and suspected sites. In exchange, Tehran received sanctions relief and international recognition of its right to a civilian fuel cycle. The deal was never a treaty on disarmament. It was a treaty on transparency.
President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA in May 2018 collapsed this framework. Iran responded incrementally, enriching first to 4.5 per cent, then to 20 per cent, and by April 2021, to 60 per cent. By late 2024, the IAEA had lost most of its monitoring capability inside Iran, including the ability to verify centrifuge manufacturing.
In his second term, Trump has moved beyond the JCPOA’s compliance logic toward what is best termed a custody doctrine. Reporting by Axios and the New York Times indicates that Washington now demands three outcomes: physical removal of Iran’s highly enriched uranium, a twenty-year suspension of all enrichment activity, and permanent decommissioning of the underground facilities at Fordow and Natanz. During the Islamabad round of talks on 12 to 13 April 2026, the Iranian delegation countered with a five-year moratorium and a monitored in-country down-blending process, which Vice President J.D. Vance rejected before the delegation’s abrupt departure.
The significance of this pivot is often underappreciated. Washington is no longer asking Iran to renounce a weapons programme, which Tehran has always denied pursuing. It is asking Iran to relinquish the civilian dual-use capability that the NPT explicitly protects. This is a transition from non-proliferation to selective denuclearisation.
Iran’s NPT Position and the Article IV Argument
Iran has been a party to the NPT since 1970 and consistently frames its enrichment programme within Article IV, which recognises “the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination”. Tehran maintains that its facilities at Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan are declared, that they are subject to a comprehensive safeguards agreement with the IAEA, and that the escalation to 60 per cent was a calibrated political response to the unilateral American withdrawal from the JCPOA rather than an indication of weapons intent.
The Iranian position in the current negotiations, as reported in regional media, is that Tehran is prepared to surrender the 60 per cent stockpile and accept new constraints on enrichment, but only under conditions that preserve sovereignty. Custody by the IAEA, or by Russia, is acceptable. Custody by the United States, an adversary that has twice struck Iranian nuclear sites within twelve months, is not.
The distinction is not semantic. Iranian officials have argued that handing enriched material to a belligerent party during an active conflict would establish a precedent in which any non-nuclear-weapon state developing peaceful capabilities could be disarmed by force rather than by safeguards. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has repeatedly invoked the principle of equal treatment among NPT parties. Tehran’s additional demand, a formal guarantee against future American withdrawal of the kind Trump executed in 2018, reflects an institutional distrust that years of American unilateralism have entrenched.
The Israeli Asymmetry: Opacity, Exception, and Veto
No serious analysis of the Iranian file is possible without reference to Israel’s own undeclared arsenal. According to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Nuclear Notebook and the Nuclear Threat Initiative, Israel is estimated to possess approximately ninety plutonium-based warheads, with production capacity for up to two hundred more. SIPRI assessesthat Israel is modernising its nuclear arsenal and appears to be upgrading its plutonium production reactor site at Dimona. The NTI notes that Israel’s Jericho III intermediate-range ballistic missiles, its Dolphin-class submarines capable of launching nuclear-armed cruise missiles, and its air-delivered weapons together constitute a credible nuclear triad.
Israel has never signed the NPT. It has never placed its Dimona reactor under IAEA comprehensive safeguards. It has practised a doctrine of amimut, or nuclear opacity, since a 1969 understanding between Richard Nixon and Golda Meir, an understanding tolerated by successive American administrations and shielded by Washington during each NPT Review Conference.
The asymmetry is not merely ethical. It is structural. An NPT regime that tolerates a non-signatory nuclear-armed state in the Middle East while demanding the seizure of enriched material from a signatory state cannot sustain its claim to universal legitimacy. The Arms Control Association has argued that Israeli opacity has historically generated, rather than deterred, proliferation pressures across the region, citing Iraq’s AMAD Project, Libya’s abandoned programme, and current Saudi hedging. The House of Commons Library formally classifies Israel, alongside India and Pakistan, as a de facto nuclear-weapon state.
Israel’s security anxieties about an Iranian bomb are legitimate. Yet the reverse anxiety, shared across the Arab League and Iran, is no less legitimate when viewed from within the same normative framework. To invoke Article IV only selectively is to hollow out the treaty’s foundational bargain.
The Conventional Deterrent: Missiles, Drones, and Regional Reach
One of the paradoxes of the current crisis is that Iran has demonstrated a form of deterrence without nuclear weapons. Through the April 2024 and October 2024 direct exchanges with Israel, through the operational use of the Shahed-136, Arash-2, and Fattah missile series, and through a multi-tiered doctrine of asymmetric warfare networked with Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iraqi partners, Tehran has established that it can impose strategic costs on a nuclear-armed adversary at range. The Fattah-1, unveiled in June 2023 and reportedly used against Israeli targets in 2024, represents Iran’s claim to a hypersonic-class capability, positioning it alongside Russia, China, and North Korea as the fourth state to field such a system, although Western analysts continue to debate whether it is a genuine hypersonic glide vehicle or a manoeuvrable re-entry body.
This conventional deterrent partly explains why much of the Iranian security establishment, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has historically been sceptical of the strategic value of a small nuclear arsenal. A nuclear-armed Iran would almost certainly trigger Saudi matching, probable Egyptian reconsideration, and the collapse of the NPT across the region. A conventionally deterrent Iran imposes comparable costs without the proliferation penalty. The outcome of the February 2026 war, however, has placed this doctrine under severe stress. The ceasefire terms under negotiation will determine whether Tehran preserves its conventional leverage, particularly at the Strait of Hormuz, where Washington has now imposed a naval blockade.
Extended Deterrence: Could Moscow or Beijing Offer a Nuclear Umbrella?
The question of whether Russia or China could extend a NATO-style nuclear guarantee over Iran deserves serious examination. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty commits allies to mutual defence, underwritten by the American nuclear umbrella through forward-deployed weapons in Europe and institutional nuclear-sharing arrangements.
The Iran–Russia Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Treaty, signed by Vladimir Putin and Masoud Pezeshkian in January 2025 and ratified by the Russian State Duma in April 2025, does not approach this threshold. Analysis by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace confirms that the treaty’s security provisions are almost identical to those of its 2001 predecessor, committing the parties only to refrain from aiding an aggressor, to share intelligence, and to hold joint exercises. Unlike the Russia–North Korea treaty of June 2024, there is no mutual defence clause, no deployment provision, and no explicit nuclear guarantee. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Rudenko stated explicitly during the Duma ratification debate that the treaty does not constitute a military alliance.
Beijing’s position is structurally similar. China supports Iran’s right to peaceful enrichment at the IAEA Board of Governors and has a 2021 twenty-five-year cooperation agreement with Tehran, but neither instrument contains extended deterrence commitments. Chinese nuclear doctrine, built upon a declared no-first-use posture and minimum deterrence, is institutionally unsuited to umbrella extension.
A plausible intermediate arrangement would be a formal negative security assurance, adopted under UN Security Council auspices and guaranteeing that Iran would not be attacked with nuclear weapons in exchange for verified non-weaponisation. This is the mechanism that historically stabilised the Latin American, South-East Asian, and African nuclear-weapon-free zones. Whether the current political climate can generate such an assurance is doubtful, but it remains the most realistic step short of a formal alliance.
The Road Not Taken: A Middle East Zone Free of Weapons of Mass Destruction
In 1974, Iran and Egypt jointly proposed to the UN General Assembly the establishment of a Nuclear Weapon Free Zone in the Middle East. The proposal was broadened under Egypt’s 1990 Mubarak Initiative to encompass chemical and biological weapons and their delivery systems. The 1995 NPT Review and Extension Conference adopted a Resolution on the Middle East, co-sponsored by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia, calling for the creation of such a zone, the resolution being the political price of the NPT’s indefinite extension.
Thirty-one years later, that resolution remains unimplemented. The United Nations General Assembly now hosts an annual conference on the zone, convened since 2019 under Egyptian initiative and attended by all twenty-two Arab League states, Iran, and four of the five NPT nuclear-weapon states. Israel has refused to attend. The United States voted against the 2018 General Assembly resolution that established the conference process, alongside Israel and Micronesia.
Israeli objections are substantive. Tel Aviv argues that a zone presupposes a durable regional peace that does not yet exist and that existing Arab and Iranian proposals amount to singling out Israel. These concerns are not unreasonable. Yet they cannot be reconciled with an American policy that simultaneously demands Iran surrender enriched material while Israel’s arsenal remains outside any verification regime. A reciprocal zone, phased over perhaps fifteen to twenty years and integrated with a regional security architecture involving the Gulf Cooperation Council states, remains the only structurally coherent path out of the present crisis. Absent such a framework, every future diplomatic resolution of the Iranian file will be provisional.
The Current Talks and the NPT at Risk
The mediation effort under way in April 2026, led by Pakistan with support from Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, is the most substantive diplomatic engagement since the collapse of the JCPOA. Reporting by Axios indicates that a three-page memorandum of understanding is under discussion. It would combine a partial cash release of approximately twenty billion dollars in frozen Iranian funds, monitored down-blending of a portion of the enriched stockpile inside Iran, shipment of the remainder to a third country, a ban on underground enrichment facilities, and a compromise moratorium somewhere between Iran’s five-year offer and the American twenty-year demand. The Strait of Hormuz remains a separate and unresolved track.
The 2026 NPT Review Conference, scheduled later this year, will be unusually consequential. If Iran is forced to surrender fissile material under duress while Israel’s arsenal remains shielded, the credibility of Article IV will collapse among non-nuclear-weapon states across the Global South. Members of the Non-Aligned Movement have already signalled that a coerced disarmament of Iran, imposed through military action rather than through treaty-based mechanisms, would undermine the grand bargain upon which the NPT rests: non-proliferation by non-weapon states in exchange for disarmament commitments by weapon states and equitable access to peaceful nuclear energy for all.
Conclusion: Custody versus Compliance
The current crisis over Iran’s enriched uranium is best understood not as a technical dispute about stockpile size nor as a purely bilateral matter between Washington and Tehran but as a test of the NPT’s universal legitimacy. A deal that secures the 440 kilograms through monitored down-blending and third-country transfer, under genuine IAEA custody rather than American physical control, is achievable and would preserve the normative framework. A deal that sees American forces removing Iranian material under duress, while Israeli facilities remain outside any safeguard’s regime, would resolve a short-term proliferation risk at the cost of the long-term proliferation order.
Iran’s demonstrated conventional deterrent, the structural limits of Russian and Chinese extended deterrence, and the continuing unavailability of a regional weapons-free zone together mean that only a carefully calibrated compromise, negotiated rather than imposed, can produce durable stabilisation. The distinction between custody and compliance is not rhetorical. It is the boundary between an NPT that still means something to the many and an NPT that serves only the few. If the current talks in Islamabad and Ankara fail to preserve that distinction, the war that began on 28 February 2026 will not have been the last.
Tahir Azad
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