Rajan Menon

Now, the procedure for doing that, how quickly and at what pace and over what period of time has to be worked out, right?

I should just add one quick thing about phase one.

What's very interesting about phase one is the Israelis have insisted that the Iranians need to make a commitment on two issues.

One is to reduce the number and range of the ballistic missiles.

And secondly, to stop supporting their partners in the region, the Houthis in Yemen, but especially Hezbollah.

The Iranians have made no commitment to do that as part of phase one.

Then you have phase two, which is, of course, the nuclear part.

Right.

That's not as big a deal because Iran has maintained this verbally ever since the 2015 JCPOA agreement that Obama signed with Iran.

If you read the preamble, it says Iran will for all time, I'm paraphrasing here, renounce the development of nuclear weapons, any kind of nuclear ambition.

So this is not some big thing that's been achieved, right?

The real problem is Iran has accumulated, since the JCPOA was torn apart by President Trump, about close to 1,000 pounds of uranium enriched to 60%.

That's within a hair of weapons-grade uranium, which is 90% or more, right?

So there's the question of what will happen to that.

Now, Trump has said over and over again that, well, this will be removed from Iran.

The new supreme leader, Majdaba Khamenei, has said that is not going to be allowed.

Now, if you don't remove it, another possibility is something called downblending, where you take

uranium of 90 or 60 percent, and you mix that uranium with either natural uranium or depleted uranium, thereby bringing it down to about 5 percent, then the verification has to be worked out.

How will the United States and the rest of the world know that, in fact, Iran is not

amassing more weapons-grade uranium.