In a quiet Rome suburb, the world's nuclear fate is being decided

Telegraph

23-05-2025

On Friday afternoon, a convoy departed from a villa in the leafy, if somewhat dull, Rome neighbourhood of Camilluccia.
Inside one of the vehicles was US president Donald Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff, who was said to be dashing for a flight having just spent two and a half hours behind the pebble-dashed walls of the Omani embassy compound, attempting to hammer out a new nuclear deal with Iran.
Their hosts from the Middle Eastern Sultanate will have provided all the usual necessities of a board meeting: bottled water, tea and coffee, and non-letterheaded paper. And the early signs appeared positive, with Omani officials saying the talks had made 'some but not conclusive progress'.
'We hope to clarify the remaining issues in the coming days, to allow us to proceed towards the common goal of reaching a sustainable and honourable agreement,' foreign minister Sayyid Badr bin Hamad bin Hamood Albusaidi said.
The common goal, put simply, is preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, a regional arms race, and a major war – if not all three. The time to achieve it, however, is rapidly dwindling.
Everything appears to hang on a single statistic. Iran wants to be able to enrich uranium to at least 3.67 per cent purity, the level needed in order to run civilian nuclear reactors, and which was allowed under a previous nuclear deal with Washington.
The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed between Iran and six other world powers – China, France, Germany, Russia, the US and the UK – was a compromise. It allowed Iran to pursue nuclear power in exchange for strict limits on the amount and purity of the uranium it could enrich, and an invasive inspections regime to make sure it didn't cheat.
Those restrictions were aimed at preventing Tehran from building a bomb. But critics said they were never watertight and Trump ditched the JCPOA during his first stint in the White House.
He is now pursuing a new agreement, with the maximalist demand that Iran should not be able to enrich any uranium, to any level (which the Islamic republic has rejected for decades).
The gap between zero and 3.67 could be the difference between success and failure, peace and war.
'The Omanis are very good at keeping things under wraps'
This weekend's meeting will mark the fifth round of 'indirect' talks between American and Iranian diplomats since Trump wrote to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei giving Iran 60 days to agree to a new nuclear deal, or face military action.
That deadline is thought to have already expired.
Rome is a logistical compromise. Most of the talks have taken place in Oman itself. Specifically in the personal home of Badr bin Hamad, the Sultanate's Oxford-educated foreign minister.
The mansion, a short drive from the airport in the sun-baked, dusty capital of Muscat, conveniently has separate wings, one furnished in Western style and the other in the Middle Eastern manner.
Fittingly, the Americans were installed in the former, the Iranians in the latter.
In theory, the indirect talks were meant to see the two sides – led by Witkoff and Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi respectively – remain in hermetically sealed rooms while Badr bin Hamad personally shuttled written messages from one end of his house to the other.
In practice, says Arash Azizi, an American-Iranian academic who has spoken to members of the Iranian delegation, they have increasingly been speaking face to face.
'I have good information that they do actually sit on the same desk and talk. There are just also other people at the table, right? They can call that indirect, just because there is also someone else there.
'On the first day they didn't have a session together in the same room, but Witkoff and Aragchi did shake hands outside. On other days, they have been in the same room. When they write things, they write them on paper without a letterhead, and they give it to the Omani foreign minister, and he gives it back and forth. That's the sort of mechanics.'
No one really knows the details of what is being said, or how much time the delegations are speaking face to face or relying on intermediaries, and that is deliberate.
The opacity gives both sides the latitude to do the business of diplomacy without worrying about public and political backlash at home.
'The beauty of Oman doing this is that the two sides can come out, and the Iranian foreign minister can say, 'I had a five-minute chat with Witkoff.' You know, upon leaving the meeting, you know, we bumped into each other and had a five-minute sort of courtesy meeting. And then, the Americans can say 'Iran and US had a 45-minute direct conversation', and no one can prove it one way or another,' says Ali Vaez, the Iran project director at Crisis Group. 'The Omanis are very good at keeping things under wraps.'
Indeed, so trusted are the Omanis that further talks between the two sides will take place at a date and venue decided by the Sultanate, a source said to be close to the Iranian negotiating team told Reuters on Friday.
The challenges
Iran has been running a nuclear enrichment programme for more than two decades, and Western countries have been trying to stop it building a bomb for just as long.
Under the 2015 JCPOA, Iran accepted limits on the amount of uranium it could enrich in exchange for sanctions relief.
But since Trump pulled the United States out of the deal in 2018, it has developed more advanced centrifuges and begun stockpiling uranium enriched to 60 per cent purity – one short technical step from the 90 per cent needed for weapons-grade material.
According to the last report by International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, Iran had 274.8kg (605.8lb) of uranium enriched up to 60 per cent as of February 8. That's up from the 182.3kg it was said to have when the previous report was published in November, itself a rise on the 164.7kg recorded in August.
That's about six and a half bombs' worth. The IAEA, the UN's nuclear watchdog, estimates that 42kg of 60 per cent enriched uranium is enough to produce one weapon – once it has been further enriched to 90 per cent.
In other words, Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than it has ever been. So the pressure is now on to find a replacement for the JCPOA before Trump and possibly his Israeli allies decide they have no choice but to remove the threat by force.
The deal
Trump has appointed Witkoff, a genial lawyer-turned-real-estate-developer and long-standing personal friend, to lead the American delegations to Muscat and Rome.
The 68-year-old has been described by associates in the real-estate world as a polite and non-adversarial negotiator.
But he should not be mistaken for being a pushover. Witkoff is not above leaning on his boss's more volatile reputation to get things done, and in January he did just that to strong-arm Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, into a ceasefire in Gaza (albeit a short-lived one).
Across the table is Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister.
A 62-year-old career diplomat, Araghchi has a reputation as a tough negotiator. He also knows the file: he headed the Iranian delegation under Javad Zarif, the then Iranian foreign minister, who negotiated the previous nuclear deal in 2015.
'He is very serious, very smart, and a graduate, incidentally, of the University of Kent,' says Sir Simon Gass, the former British diplomat who headed the UK delegation in those talks.
'He speaks excellent English, as you would think. He can certainly be tough, but he's also got a sense of humour.
'I enjoyed dealing with him. I think you would be unwise to argue after these negotiations that any of you become friends, because that's not the point of the thing, but I certainly liked him. I felt that he was as straight as a very tough negotiator can be.'
Araghchi, experienced though he is, has only limited authority.
Back in Tehran, the man who holds Iran's nuclear file is Ali Shamkhani, a former IRGC admiral and adviser to the Supreme Leader, Khamenei.
Shamkhani does not appear to have attended any of the meetings in Muscat and Rome, but he has issued several public interventions that have been taken as articulations of Tehran's position. Witkoff's team will have to bear all of this in mind as the talks proceed.
'The Iranians are sophisticated negotiators. They have a good command of English and a deep knowledge of the nuclear subject,' says Gass.
'They quite often could turn dramatic. You know, if things weren't going well, there could well be a good deal of, sort of, throwing up of hands and raised voices, and that sort of thing. But they are very good negotiators.'
But whatever goes on during the discussions, ultimately, the final decisions are made by Khamenei himself.
'They [the negotiators] inevitably get a mandate, which comes from the Supreme Leader. But they don't always know exactly what it is that the Supreme Leader wants, and he might not have decided until he sees the full agreement and has weighed up the politics in Iran,' says Gass.
Enrichment
At least for a period, the successive rounds of talks appeared to be productive.
On May 11, the US and Iran held their fourth round of discussions in Badr bin Hamad's house in Muscat. The negotiations lasted more than three hours, and appeared to bear fruit.
The Iranian foreign ministry said they had been 'difficult but useful' in better understanding the US position.
A senior US official briefed American papers that the sides agreed 'to move forward with the talks to continue working through technical elements'.
We even began to get a sense of what was being agreed. Majid Takht Ravanchi, a deputy foreign minister of Iran, said Tehran would accept 'a series of restrictions on the level and volume of enrichment' for 'a limited period of time'.
Three days later, Shamkhani said in a rare interview with NBC that Iran was prepared to give up its entire 60-per-cent stockpile, agree to only enrich uranium to lower levels needed for civilian use, and allow inspections to check its compliance in exchange for sanctions relief.
And in Doha last week, Trump himself appeared to suggest there had been substantial progress. 'I think we're getting close to maybe doing a deal,' he said, adding that Iran had 'sort of agreed to… the terms' put forward by Washington. The Iranians, too, were 'happy with the progress of the talks', says Azizi.
Then, it all fell apart.
The next round of talks, meant to take place last weekend, was postponed. Araghchi returned to Tehran to host an annual diplomatic summit.
Khamenei then poured cold water on the whole enterprise, remarking at an event in the Iranian capital that 'we don't think it will lead to any outcome'.
And on Monday this week, the Americans leaked an intelligence assessment suggesting Israel was readying for military strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities.
Enrichment
The trigger seems to have been the Americans introducing a new condition: that whatever happens, Iran cannot continue to enrich its own uranium at any level. This, Witkoff told ABC, was the US's 'one very, very clear red line',
'We cannot allow even 1 per cent of an enrichment capability,' he said.
On negotiations with Iran for a new nuclear deal, U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff tells @JonKarl that uranium enrichment is the Trump administration's "one very, very clear red line."
"We cannot have that. Because enrichment enables weaponization." https://t.co/eXpYGKlkRR pic.twitter.com/WmauqQuAEV
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) May 18, 2025
It was this 'excessive and outrageous' demand, as the Iranians saw it, that prompted Khamenei's remark about talks being useless.
Ravanchi told Iran's Nour News – an outlet owned, incidentally, by Shamkhani – that 'regarding zero enrichment, we said from the beginning that if this is their [the Americans'] position, it is natural that the work will not actually get anywhere'.
This is not just an act. Iran has been consistent on its right to enrich for more than two decades.
'On the Iranian side, there's been a wall-to-wall consensus on this,' says Azizi. 'Khamenei, the opposition, everybody has given speeches saying we cannot give up the right to enrichment. Even some of the regime's opposition frankly say Iran shouldn't give up the right to enrichment.'
For veterans of the Iranian nuclear issue, this is a case of extreme déjà vu.
'That's always at the heart of the issue for various reasons,' says Gass. 'This was precisely the main point of the JCPOA. For a long time, the Americans in those negotiations were saying no enrichment at all, just as they're saying now. That wasn't where they ended up, though. In the JCPOA, they agreed, in the end, to a very low level of enrichment.
'That was what unlocked the door: agreement that there could be a little bit of enrichment, but then you need very robust assurance mechanisms to guarantee that that is being verified and that the rules are being followed. So it's tricky, it's technically complex. You can't negotiate that very quickly.'
In 2015, the sides eventually agreed Iran could only enrich uranium up to 3.67 per cent purity, and was only allowed to possess 300kg of this low-enriched uranium at any one time.
Why are the Americans resorting to the same opening demand they tried more than a decade ago?
Netanyahu has publicly insisted that any deal should be 'Libyan style', which would mean Iran allowing Western powers to demolish the entirety of its nuclear infrastructure.
Some hawks in Washington are pushing the same message: that Iran is more economically and militarily vulnerable than it has been at any point in recent history, and that it can now be forced to accept something it previously resisted.
Others, however, are not impressed.
'Zero enrichment has a 22-year unblemished track record of failure,' says Vaez. 'In fact, I would say zero enrichment is the mother of Iran's nuclear programme, because when in the mid-2000s the US rejected an arrangement that the Europeans had with Iran, which allowed Iran to have a very limited nuclear programme, it resulted in Iran escalating its nuclear programme to industrial scale.
'When Trump withdrew from Iran's nuclear deal in 2018, that resulted in Iran ratcheting up its nuclear programme and now basically becoming a threshold nuclear weapon state.
'Every time insistence on the perfect has resulted in the US losing the opportunity to get the good enough.'
Vaez, and everyone else outside of Trump's inner circle, is in the dark about Washington's ultimate intention.
'The question I do not have an answer to is whether this is his opening salvo or it is a red line for the US. If it's an opening salvo, then as soon as you get over the maximum demand, there's so many technical solutions that would allow both sides to get most of what they want. But if it is a real red line for the US, then these negotiations will collapse very soon,' he says.
'I still think that Trump has learnt from the experience in the first term that maximalist demands are not going to work with Iran, and he really doesn't want war. But we will find out soon enough.'
Timeline to war
If the talks do fall apart, the likelihood of an Israeli or joint US-Israeli strike on Iran rises significantly.
But war is unlikely to break out straight away. First, there is likely to be a ratcheting up of diplomatic pressure.
The first landmark could be the release of the next IAEA report on Iran's nuclear programme, which could be out by the end of this week.
It is unlikely to contain much new information beyond an update on the size of Iran's stockpile and a repetition of long-standing concerns about transparency, access and unexplained traces of nuclear material.
Britain, France and Germany, the remaining Western members of the JCPOA, may then decide to 'snap-back' the sanctions that the 2015 deal suspended, on the grounds of Iranian non-compliance.
That process would probably be complete some time in July or August, and would have to be done before Russia, an Iranian ally, assumes the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council in October, says Vaez.
The option to 'snap-back' sanctions in the JCPOA also expires in October, putting pressure on the Europeans to use it or lose it.
'Iran has threatened that if that happens, it would basically withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. If Iran indeed delivers on the threat of withdrawing from the NPT and kicking out the UN inspectors, that's when there will be justification for military action,' says Vaez.
'I think it's even in Israel's interest, or in the hawks in Washington's interest, to see snap-back happen before they launch a strike. Because once you do snap-back, basically Iran has returned to a pariah status under international law, because it would once again be categorised as a threat to international peace and security… and then obviously a strike on its nuclear programme will become much more justified.'
In other words, war, if it happens, will most probably break out in autumn.
Potential for strikes
The US intelligence assessment leaked to CNN this week suggested Israel's plans for strikes on Iran have been rapidly accelerated, suggesting Netanyahu is preparing to launch a unilateral attack if talks fall apart or produce a deal that does not end all enrichment.
In a strictly military sense, that is entirely plausible. The Israeli military has been planning and training for strikes on Iran's nuclear programme for two decades.
The success of such an operation is another question. Conventional wisdom says Israel would need help from the US to deliver the kind of crushing blow that could permanently extinguish Iran's nuclear programme.
But more important is the political consideration. Could Netanyahu risk publicly undermining Trump?
Definitely not, is the assessment of Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel and Senior Fellow at the INSS think tank in Tel Aviv.
'He's afraid of Trump in a way that he never was of Biden, because he knew that Biden was a true friend. It came from his insides, and he could put a little bit of pressure on Israel, but he would never turn against it. You don't know that with Trump; he's mercurial, and so he's much more concerned and careful with how he plays it,' says Freilich.
'If you look at why Israel hasn't attacked the Iranian nuclear programme at any point in the last 30 years, despite the so-called Begin doctrine, which says that Israel will prevent any hostile country in the region from achieving a nuclear weapon by all means, I think one of the two primary reasons was the US,' he adds.
'If Trump is opposed to it today, then I don't think Israel can go ahead.'
The reported Israeli war plans, Freilich says, look very much like the kind of leak American administrations traditionally engineer when they are afraid Israel is going to do something obstructive. In other words, Trump would rather have a deal than a war.
'And I think, by the way, that much of the Israeli defence establishment, unlike at the political level, would be quite happy if they can reach a deal,' says Freilich.
'Most people in defence have come to the conclusion that the JCPOA was the best of the bad options that were available to us.
'It won't be a similar deal in terms of content, because it has to be different, but a new agreement that will again significantly postpone the nuclear programme, is again the best of the bad options.'
There are plenty of people in Tehran equally desperate for a deal, says Azizi. And he argues there are plenty of creative solutions to the enrichment issues. Centrifuges can be limited in size and quantity, Iran's stockpile could be exported to a third country such as Russia, the limit of 3.67 enrichment could be reimposed and so on.
'My take is that these are basically negotiation tactics on both sides. They're drawing a very hard line in the sand, and they're going to bluff each other and test each other,' Azizi says. 'They could find a technical solution if there is political will in the capitals.'
The chance of anything being agreed and finalised in the next few weeks is vanishingly small, however.
'This is just going to be very difficult,' says Gass. 'First, simply because what the United States is likely to want is probably a long way from what Iran can offer. Second, because both sides have political pressures on them to achieve particular results. And third, because actually, as the JCPOA showed, once you really get into these subjects, they are very technically complicated.
'You need a lot of experts to sit down and work out issues which have to be recorded in minute detail, because there is zero trust between the United States and Iran, or indeed Iran and the Europeans. And therefore everything needs to be codified, because otherwise your concern is that when you actually try to put the agreement into effect, you will find that there are gaps which lead to doubts and opportunities for people to cut corners.'
It took around three years of painstaking and highly detailed and technical diplomacy to get the JCPOA over the line in 2015. Today, things are much more complicated. Iran has already produced enriched uranium, and possesses extensive and advanced centrifuges capable of delivering more. Because the permanent IAEA mission on the ground has faced restrictions since the JCPOA collapsed, there is also a 'knowledge gap' concerning the extent of Iran's nuclear infrastructure.
'It always reminds me of the Ginger Rogers line about Fred Astaire, she had to do everything he had to do, but backwards and in high heels,' says Gass.
'And that's how I look at these negotiations. The JCPOA was extremely hard, but if you can't actually talk to each other, I would think that's harder still.'