US and Iran conclude a second round of nuclear talks

President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran, center, and commanders of the country’s military watch as military equipment passes by during the annual Army Day parade on Friday, April 18, 2025, in Tehran. As Iran and the United States on Saturday met again for diplomatic talks over Tehran’s nuclear activities, few will be watching the outcome as closely as Israel. (Arash Khamooshi/The New York Times)

By David E. Sanger, Farnaz Fassihi and Lara Jakes

Iran and the United States wrapped up a second round of diplomatic talks Saturday over Tehran’s nuclear activities, setting an agenda for rapid-paced negotiations that, according to Iranian officials, would not require the dismantlement of the country’s extensive nuclear infrastructure.

Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said after meeting Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s envoy, that an expert group would meet in the coming days to discuss technical details, including setting the maximum levels to which Iran could enrich uranium; the size of nuclear stockpiles it could retain; and how compliance with any agreement could be monitored and verified.

But implicit in that description of the future negotiations was an assumption that Trump would be willing to back down from the administration’s original insistence that all of Iran’s major nuclear sites and long-range missile arsenals must be subject to what Michael Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, recently called “full dismantlement.”

The question of whether to allow Iran to retain the ability to produce nuclear fuel — with the risk that it could use it to create a bomb — has sharply divided Trump’s advisers. Those divisions have broken out in public in recent days, even as Witkoff, a real estate developer and friend of the president, was preparing for the talks that took place Saturday at the residence of the Omani ambassador in Rome. Oman is acting as mediator in the talks.

Iran hawks in the administration, led by Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have argued that it is far too risky to leave Iran with the ability to make its own nuclear fuel.

And agreeing to limits on how much uranium Iran can possess and how much enrichment it can perform exposes Trump to the critique that he is simply replicating key elements of the 2015 Obama-era nuclear agreement, which he called a “disaster” and ultimately ripped up in 2018.

Iranian officials have said that they will not disassemble or destroy the nuclear infrastructure in which they have invested billions of dollars. Witkoff has told administration officials privately that if they insist on full dismantlement, he is unlikely to emerge from the talks with a deal — the only way to avoid a military attack on Iran’s facilities, Trump has said. Israel has been pressing for military action against Iran’s nuclear sites, which would likely involve the United States.

Speaking after the talks ended, a senior administration official noted “very good progress in our direct and indirect discussions,” meaning that the parties spoke face-to-face as well as through their Omani host.

In private conversations leading up to the session, the Iranians told U.S. officials that they were willing to reduce enrichment levels to those specified in the 2015 agreement struck with the Obama administration: 3.67%, the level needed to produce fuel for nuclear power plants.

Since Trump pulled out of that accord, Iran has been enriching to far higher levels of around 60% purity, just shy of what is needed to produce a nuclear weapon. That gives Tehran two options: race to produce weapons-grade fuel, or negotiate with the United States to return to the original levels in the 2015 accord.

“What’s happening in Rome and Oman, in an irony of ironies, is the resurrection of something looking pretty close” to the agreement that President Barack Obama approved and that Trump disparaged, said Aaron David Miller of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

It may be the best Trump can get.

Witkoff paved the way for such an agreement, describing in an interview Tuesday a possible agreement that would essentially allow Iran to produce fuel at low levels, with careful inspection and monitoring. But he was forced to backtrack. He then posted on social media that the U.S. position was that “Iran must stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program.” The key word was “eliminate.”

Witkoff did not speak immediately after the negotiations — the second round in two weeks — ended Saturday afternoon in Rome. Oman said those technical negotiations would take place in Muscat, its capital, in the coming days.

When pressed this past week on whether the United States could live with Iran having a limited nuclear-enrichment capability, U.S. officials dodged the question, saying only that Trump had vowed that Iran would not be permitted to have a nuclear weapon.

Witkoff will now have to brief Trump and his administration colleagues about the latest round of talks. Officials familiar with the internal debate say that Waltz and Rubio, both of whom were harsh critics of the Obama-era deal when they served in Congress, remain opposed to leaving Iran with any nuclear production capability.

On Friday, Rubio said that any deal must keep Iran from ever possessing a nuclear weapon. “It has to be something that not just prevents Iran from having a nuclear weapon now, but in the future as well,” he told reporters on a trip to Paris.

Trump has been vague about the strategic objectives of the negotiations, other than to repeat that Iran must never get a bomb — a declaration that avoids the critical question of whether the United States can live with an Iran that is a “threshold state,” able to produce a weapon on short notice.