Trump Says Iran Has Made a ‘Big’ Nuclear Promise. It Isn’t New.

Trump Says Iran Has Made a ‘Big’ Nuclear Promise. It Isn’t New.

NY Times-June7th2026

President Trump’s boasts of securing a commitment from Iranian leaders not to develop a nuclear weapon have puzzled nuclear experts who note that Tehran has made that pledge for more than 50 years

By Michael Crowley

Reporting from Washington

June 7, 2026, 5:02 a.m. ET

More than two months of on-again, off-again peace talks have made little progress toward settling the U.S. war on Iran. But President Trump has lately claimed a major breakthrough.

“The one guarantee that I have to have is that there will be no nuclear weapons,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with his daughter-in-law Lara Trump on Fox News last month. Iran, he added, has “agreed to that, and it was very interesting.”

Mr. Trump emphasized the point again on Monday. “They’ve already agreed they’re not going to have a nuclear weapon,” he told a New York Post podcast. “That was one of the things they’ve had to agree, they’ve agreed to that. That was the big thing,” he said.

Mr. Trump has said the main reason he went to war on Feb. 28 was to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. An official White House fact sheet lists 74 occasions, dating to 2011, when Mr. Trump said that Iran must never have a nuclear weapon. And when he posted his latest conditions for a deal on social media last month, the first was that “Iran must agree that they will never have a Nuclear Weapon or Bomb.”

But Mr. Trump’s boasts of an Iranian commitment have puzzled nuclear experts. The president appears to be claiming credit for something that is neither new nor, experts say, particularly meaningful.

“It’s not much of a concession,” said Gary Samore, a veteran arms control expert who dealt with Iran as a National Security Council official in the Obama administration.

One reason is that Tehran has forsworn nuclear weapons for more than 50 years, insisting over and over that its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes such as electricity and medicine. Its promises have come in the form of written pledges, verbal statements and even a religious ruling, or fatwa, from its supreme leader.

Another is that such a promise means little on its own. Its only value would come as a first step toward subsequent talks that could establish detailed limits on Iran’s nuclear activities, including its uranium enrichment. “The issue is how the pledge translates into limits on Iran’s enrichment program,” Mr. Samore said.

In fact, Iran’s promise is in the first paragraph of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the United States, under President Barack Obama, and several other world powers that Mr. Trump so often denounces.