Editor’s Note: Fearmongering about Iran’s nuclear program has been going on for two decades. They always seem to be just a few weeks away from having a bomb, and yet they still don’t have one. With that said, the real threat is not the uranium that the world focuses on but the plutonium that the world ignores. We’re not saying that Iran is weeks away from a nuclear weapon, but if there’s anything that needs any attention at all, it’s their plutonium.
When the world’s attention fixates on uranium centrifuges spinning at Natanz and Fordow, a quieter danger sits in the spent fuel ponds at Bushehr and the bombed-out shell of the Arak heavy water reactor. Nuclear weapons experts are now warning the Trump administration that any deal struck with the Islamic Republic of Iran must do what the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action conspicuously failed to do — slam shut the plutonium pathway to a bomb.
The concern is not academic. According to reporting by Benjamin Weinthal at Fox News Digital, Henry Sokolski, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and a former Pentagon nonproliferation official under President George H.W. Bush, has argued that Iran already possesses enough plutonium in spent fuel at Bushehr to fashion more than 200 nuclear weapons. The figure is staggering, yet barely registers in the public debate over Tehran’s atomic ambitions.
That blind spot is precisely the problem. Washington has spent two decades obsessing over uranium enrichment percentages, breakout timelines, and centrifuge cascades. Meanwhile, the mullahs have quietly maintained a parallel route to a weapon — one that requires no spinning rotors, no cascade halls, and no obvious enrichment signature for satellites to photograph.
Two Roads to a Bomb, One Conversation
A nuclear weapon can be built from highly enriched uranium or from plutonium. Both work. The infamous Hiroshima device used uranium; the Nagasaki bomb used plutonium. Iran’s known program has chased the uranium path, but the regime has never abandoned its plutonium infrastructure — most notably the Arak heavy water reactor, which the Israeli Defense Forces struck twice within a single year, in June 2025 and again in March 2026.
Jason Brodsky, policy director at United Against Nuclear Iran, told Fox News Digital that intelligence reports indicate Iran has repeatedly tried to rebuild Arak even after each Israeli strike. That tells you everything you need to know about the regime’s intentions. A nation pursuing peaceful nuclear energy does not keep reconstructing a heavy water reactor optimized for plutonium production after foreign militaries have twice reduced it to rubble.
“I do believe any proposed deal with Iran needs to address the plutonium pathway to nuclear weapons,” Brodsky said. “Any deal with Iran should cover the plutonium pathway.”
Then there is Bushehr, the Russian-built civilian power reactor on Iran’s southern coast. Bushehr produces electricity, but it also produces something else as a byproduct — spent nuclear fuel laden with plutonium. Sokolski has argued that the Pentagon should be using space-based surveillance and drones to ensure none of that spent fuel walks out the back door, and that any future agreement must include near-real-time monitoring of the reactor and its spent fuel pond.
The Inspection Charade
Here is where the story turns from concerning to infuriating. The last time International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors set foot inside Bushehr was August 27, 2025. Even when the IAEA had what it euphemistically called “routine access,” inspectors visited only every 90 days. Three months. A quarter of a year between checks on a facility holding enough fissile material for hundreds of warheads.
Sokolski observed that the Obama administration declined to insist on the kind of continuous surveillance the IAEA itself had requested. Tehran refused, and Washington shrugged. The result is a verification regime so porous that a determined regime would have ample time to divert spent fuel and reprocess it into weapons-grade material between visits.
The State Department, when asked about the issue, told Fox News Digital that “Iran’s nuclear program poses a threat to the United States and the entire world,” and that Tehran “stands in breach of its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty obligations by failing to provide full cooperation with the IAEA.” That is diplomatic language for a regime that has spent decades lying to inspectors, hiding facilities, and assassinating defectors.
The Skeptic’s Case
Not every expert agrees the plutonium threat is imminent. David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security told Fox News Digital he is “highly skeptical” Iran would actually use Bushehr’s spent fuel for weapons. He noted that Iran would need a plutonium-bomb design it has not developed, that any diversion would likely trigger Russia to suspend uranium fuel supplies and shut down a multibillion-dollar investment, and that most of the plutonium in Bushehr’s spent fuel is reactor-grade rather than weapons-grade.
Albright is not wrong about the technical obstacles. Reactor-grade plutonium can be weaponized but produces unreliable yields. Reprocessing requires sophisticated chemistry and dedicated facilities Iran does not currently possess. And the Russians, for all their geopolitical mischief, have a financial interest in keeping Bushehr legitimate.
But the entire history of Iran’s nuclear program is a history of doing what experts said could not, would not, or should not be done. The regime built a covert enrichment facility under a mountain at Fordow. It hid the existence of Natanz for years. It assembled a “Nuclear Archive” so detailed that when Israeli intelligence stole it in 2018, the world learned Iran had been pursuing weapons designs the entire time it was assuring inspectors otherwise. Trusting Tehran to skip the plutonium option because it would be “tricky” is the same logic that gave us the JCPOA.
What a Real Deal Demands
Andrea Stricker, deputy director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Nonproliferation and Biodefense Program, drew the line clearly. “The United States must insist on a permanent and verified ban on plutonium reprocessing in Iran under any deal,” she told Fox News Digital. Not a sunset clause. Not a fifteen-year pause. Permanent. Verified. Not negotiable.
Stricker also gave Russia rare credit for insisting Iran allow inspectors back into Bushehr after the June 2025 Israeli strikes — inspections that resumed in August of that year. She suggested the IAEA increase the frequency of those inspections to monthly, and floated the possibility of Russia removing accumulated spent fuel from the site entirely.
That last idea deserves attention. The single most effective nonproliferation measure available is physical removal of the dangerous material. If the spent fuel is not in Iran, Iran cannot reprocess it. If the heavy water reactor at Arak stays a pile of rubble, Iran cannot produce more.
The Lessons Washington Refuses to Learn
The pattern is wearying. American negotiators sit down with the Islamic Republic and focus on the obvious threat — uranium centrifuges, enrichment percentages, breakout timelines. The Iranians smile, sign agreements that cover precisely those obvious threats, and quietly preserve their alternatives. When the obvious path closes, the covert path opens.
The Obama-era JCPOA permitted Iran to keep the Arak reactor in modified form. It set sunset clauses on enrichment limits. It treated inspections as a privilege the regime could grant or withhold. And it provided sanctions relief that funded Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps proxies that have spilled American and Israeli blood ever since.
President Trump withdrew from that agreement in his first term for sound reasons. Any successor agreement must be measurably tougher, not a rebranded version of the same diplomatic theater. That means addressing both pathways to a bomb, both materials capable of producing one, and both the overt and covert infrastructure Tehran has built to keep its options open.
Scripture warns of leaders who speak peace while plotting otherwise. The prophet Jeremiah recorded the Lord’s lament against false assurances of safety: “They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.” A deal that closes the uranium door while leaving the plutonium door cracked open is precisely such a false healing — the appearance of resolution masking an unresolved threat.
The Stakes
The Islamic Republic has spent more than four decades chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” while building the industrial base to make those slogans operational. Its proxies have killed Americans in Beirut, in Iraq, in Saudi Arabia, and on October 7, 2023. Its Supreme Leader has issued fatwas, then quietly shelved them, then issued new ones. Its officials lie about the program’s purpose with a fluency that should have ended any benefit of the doubt years ago.
If President Trump secures an agreement that stops uranium enrichment but leaves Bushehr’s spent fuel unmonitored, leaves Arak reconstructable, and leaves plutonium reprocessing technically permissible, the regime will have learned exactly the lesson it learned from every previous deal — that American negotiators can be steered toward the obvious threat while the real one is preserved.
The experts sounding alarms are not warmongers. They are men and women who have spent careers studying how regimes acquire weapons of mass destruction, and they are telling the administration that history is about to repeat itself unless someone closes both doors at once. Whether Washington listens this time will determine whether the next nuclear crisis is one we negotiated our way into or one we finally negotiated our way out of.
