Khamenei Orders Iran Uranium To Stay Amid Trump Demands
Iran uranium stayed at the center of the talks on Thursday after reported that Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei issued a directive that Iran’s enriched uranium should not be sent abroad. Donald Trump responded at the White House by saying the United States will not allow Iran to keep its stockpile of highly enriched uranium.
cited two unnamed senior Iranian sources for the directive, and said the instruction reflected a consensus inside Iran’s establishment. The dispute now focuses on an estimated 440kg, or 970lb, of uranium enriched to 60 percent — far below the 90 percent needed for weapons-grade material, but still the stockpile at the center of the negotiations.
Trump Pushes Outbound Transfer
Trump said, “We will get it. We don’t need it, we don’t want it. We’ll probably destroy it after we get it, but we’re not going to let them have it,” after the United States proposed a plan to seize Iranian uranium. also reported, citing unnamed Israeli officials, that Trump had assured Israel that Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile would be sent out of Iran.
The demand lands against a narrow technical reality: most of Iran’s enriched uranium is believed to be underground, beneath the rubble of Iran’s nuclear facility, and almost all of the stockpile is thought to be in the form of hexafluoride gas. That form is movable in principle, but the report presents the stockpile itself as the object of the dispute, not a settled transfer plan.
IAEA And The 60 Percent Stockpile
International Atomic Energy Agency chief Rafael Grossi said in early March that if Iran’s 60 percent stockpile were further enriched to 90 percent, it would in theory be enough to produce more than 10 nuclear warheads. That figure gives the 440kg stockpile its weight in the talks, even though 60 percent remains below weapons-grade level.
Iran signed a deal with the United States in 2015 to limit its nuclear programme in exchange for sanctions relief, and the agreement allowed enrichment to 3.67 percent for nuclear power development purposes. Trump withdrew from that deal in 2018 and slapped sanctions back on Iran, after which Iran decided to enrich uranium to almost 60 percent.
Iran Talks Face A Narrower Path
The latest reports leave a sharper split between Washington and Tehran over who controls the material and where it may go. Trump has made the U.S. position explicit, while the Iranian directive reported by says the stockpile should not leave the country.
For now, the next confirmed diplomatic pressure point is the stockpile itself: whether negotiations can bridge the gap between a U.S. demand to move it out of Iran and an Iranian order to keep it inside the country.
