So negotiators from Iran and 6 world powers just emerged from months of negotiation
in Austria and Switzerland to announce that, believe it or not, they have an Iran nuclear deal.
"Every path way to a nuclear weapon is cut off."
But what does that actually mean?
How does all that actually work?
Well this gets technical really fast but it helps
if you go through and look at some of the most important issues
One of the big ones is uranium
thats the stuff, you dig it out of the ground and use it for nuclear fuel
for a power plant, or even for a bomb
The deal requires Iran to give up 97% of its enriched uranium
almost all of it, down to just 300kg stockpile--not very much
Uranium comes in different levels of enrichment
and this restriction is really severe, Iran is only allowed
to have its uranium up to 3.67% enrichment
and to give you a sense of what that really means, medical research grade uranium
is enriched to 20% and weapons grade uranium is enriched to 90%
so, iran's uranium is going to be way down at 3.67%
very safe and energy graded,
not something that is anywhere near what can be used for a nuclear weapon
Iran is going to give up most of its centrifuges.
It's going to go from 20,000 centrifuges to just 5,000
that are spinning fissile material.
Plus another 1,000 that it can use for research and development but can use fissile material
And if Iran decided one day, you know what, we don't like this deal anymore
we're gonna build a bomb...it would take it a really long time to do it.
And that gets to another really important issue, and that's inspections.
Inspections, and monitoring, are how we make sure that Iran is sticking to their end of the deal
and that they're not cheating
The inspections that the US got out of this deal are frankly, just astonishing.
One arms control analyst said he thought there was
"almost a 100% chance that if Iran cheated it would be caught by these inspections"
That's how good they are.
So what does Iran get for accepting all of this?
What Iran gets is relief from the economic sanctions that have been just crippling its economy
What these sanctions do is they cut off Iran's economy from the outside world,
They cut it off from international banking, international finance,
and these have been just devastating Iran's economy
and they are really desperate to get out from under these.
This is a big deal, not just for Iran the state but for the 77 million people of in Iran
It's a big middle class and they've been suffering under economic sanctions for too long
And they will finally get to have the chance of having a real economy hopefully very soon after this.