Injecting fresh uncertainty into stalled efforts to restore the Iran nuclear deal, Iran’s new president has appointed Mohammad Eslami, a U.N.-sanctioned engineer, as the nation’s top atomic official. He replaces Ali Akbar Salehi, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology–trained nuclear scientist who led the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) for the past 8 years.
Salehi and former U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz were the chief architects of the 2015 agreement, formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which restrained Iran’s efforts to produce the enriched uranium or plutonium needed for a nuclear weapon in return for relief from economic sanctions. “Salehi was such a crucial figure in getting the deal done that I can’t see any upside in his departure,” says Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Project at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
The Trump administration pulled out of the JCPOA in May 2018, after which Iran took several steps to resume nuclear activities prohibited under the agreement, including experimenting with advanced centrifuges to enrich uranium, reaching higher enrichment levels, and working uranium metal—a skill needed to build a bomb. U.S. President Joe Biden has vowed to rejoin the pact, but Iran remains at odds with the United States and other signatories, including China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. The last round of talks in Vienna aiming to restore the JCPOA ended in June and Iran has not signaled whether it will commit to another round.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi replaced Salehi as part of a broader purge of moderate voices in the previous administration. (Raisi also replaced another key figure in JCPOA negotiations, Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif.) Raisi appointed Eslami as AEOI’s president on 29 August; Eslami will also serve as one of Raisi’s vice presidents. Eslami, who earned civil engineering degrees from the University of Detroit and Ohio University, served as housing and transport minister in Iran’s previous administration.
Eslami’s ties to Iran’s military nuclear program alarm foreign observers. In 2008, the International Atomic Energy Agency sanctioned Eslami and 12 other Iranian officials for “being engaged in, directly associated with or providing support for Iran’s proliferation sensitive nuclear activities or for the development of nuclear weapon delivery systems.” At the time, Eslami headed a defense outfit called the Defence Industries Training and Research Institute, which from 1999 to 2003 oversaw a clandestine nuclear weapons effort codenamed Amad, says Andrea Stricker, a nonproliferation analyst at the nonprofit Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “Appointing an individual with connections to the prior nuclear weapons program is not a positive sign for diplomacy,” she says. “Eslami has more expertise in hiding, maintaining, and dialing up Tehran’s nuclear weapons readiness than he does in overseeing civilian nuclear projects.”
Eslami will have to come up to speed fast on Iran’s civilian nuclear portfolio if Iran opts to return to JCPOA negotiations—and Salehi’s shoes will be hard to fill. Salehi’s departure “shrinks the institutional memory on the Iranian side as well as familiarity with the technical minutiae—precisely the sort of details that will have to be hammered out in Vienna if Iran’s nuclear program is to come back into compliance with the JCPOA’s limits,” says Naysan Rafati, a senior Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group.
Even if diplomats manage to get JCPOA negotiations back on track, it may be impossible to replicate the personal chemistry that allowed Iran and the United States to overcome mutual distrust and forge the historic deal. “The relationship that Salehi and Moniz developed was like catching lightning in a bottle,” Lewis says. “I don’t expect an opportunity like that to come again.”