Ben Rhodes

On the scale of what we accomplished versus the destruction we wrought, I'm glad this is happening.

It's better than destroying a civilization and perpetuating the war, but we must keep the perspective here because there's going to be a tremendous amount of propaganda that suggests that somehow this was a great deal when, in fact, this was a deal you could have had

easily without fighting the war.

But other than that, pretty good.

So, I mean, I'm just, you know, I'm glad it's happening.

I mean, but I can feel what's coming from Trump and his, you know, echo chamber, to use a phrase.

And I think we just have to look at reality.

So in terms of what the deal was, in terms of what the US got out of the deal, Iran agreed to strict limitations on the nuclear program.

So just to go through a few of them, they shipped their stockpile of enriched uranium out of the country.

So this thing that Trump is going to be touting was routine under the JCPOA.

Like whatever stockpile they accumulated, they had to ship out 98% of their enriched uranium at any given time.

And then they submitted- Where would it go?

It would go to Russia, and it would be blended down, and it would go to Russia.

And essentially, they would get end use of things like medical isotopes, but they couldn't accumulate the stockpile in their country.

They destroyed the core of their plutonium reactor, so they kind of wiped out their capacity to pursue a nuclear weapon with plutonium.

They accepted limitations on the number of centrifuges that they could be operating,

all of their facilities were under strict monitoring from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA.

Not only were there kind of centrifuge facilities at Natanz and Fordow, the two facilities where they operated centrifuges, not only did they have those limitations and have IAEA presence there, including cameras, and it wasn't just people showing up every few weeks.

It was kind of constant monitoring.

But there was also monitoring