Former Iranian diplomat Hamid Baeidinejad said Iran’s nuclear issue will remain a defining challenge for decades, arguing that uranium enrichment is a permanent feature of the country’s national and diplomatic landscape.
Speaking at a conference on “Nuclear Law in Peace, War and Post-War,” Baeidinejad said Iran’s nuclear file “has been with us for fifty years and will stay with us for another fifty.”
He described enrichment as “a very important national achievement” that cannot be separated from Iran’s future international relations.
He said reaching any new agreement on the issue would require long and exhausting negotiations, adding that “there is no easy or quick solution to such a complex international matter.”
Baeidinejad also said five rounds of indirect talks between Tehran and Washington over the summer failed to yield progress and that mutual distrust deepened after an Israeli strike in June.
According to him, “Iran’s only path forward is continued diplomacy, even if the process is difficult and slow.”
He called for international consensus to ban attacks on nuclear facilities, saying, “No one in Iran doubts that attacking nuclear installations must be absolutely prohibited and punishable under international law,” but acknowledged that building such a norm would take “years of study, debate and persuasion.”
Baeidinejad added that the 2015 deal’s snapback mechanism had been designed after lengthy talks to balance Iran’s demand for lifting UN sanctions with the powers’ insistence on retaining a safeguard. “More than a thousand hours of negotiations were devoted to this single issue,” he said.
He urged Iranian academics and research institutions to engage more deeply in nuclear law and safeguards, arguing that “we must become an active player in shaping global norms, not just a subject of them.”
