Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, appointed by the Assembly of Experts on 7 March after Israeli strikes killed his father, ordered on Thursday 21 May that Iran's 60%-enriched uranium stockpile must remain inside the country, two senior Iranian sources told Reuters 1. The rationale offered through those sources: exporting the material would leave Iran more vulnerable to future US and Israeli strikes. Before the war, during quiet talks with the Trump administration, Tehran had signalled willingness to ship half of the stockpile out as a confidence-building step . Thursday's directive reverses that offer, and breaks what Israeli officials told Reuters was Donald Trump's private assurance to Benjamin Netanyahu that any settlement would require all of Iran's Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU, uranium enriched above 20% U-235; 60% sits roughly two-thirds of the way to weapons-grade) to leave the country.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimated 440.9 kg of 60%-enriched material at the time of the June 2025 strikes. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists put the figure nearer 540 kg at the Isfahan tunnel complex, built from pre-war production rates the IAEA can no longer verify. Former Israeli intelligence officials told Haaretz last weekend that the strike campaign left Iran's nuclear capacity structurally intact . The stockpile survived; the directive now declares it will not move.
An Iranian official denied the order to Al Jazeera's Ali Hashem, calling the Reuters story "propaganda by enemies of the agreement" while conceding that Iran would "independently reduce enrichment levels within the framework" 2. The denial and the directive describe the same operational outcome: the material stays inside Iran. Iranian sources have floated dilution under IAEA supervision as a compromise, but the Majlis voted 221-0 on 11 April to suspend all IAEA cooperation. Any supervised dilution would first require Tehran to reinstate the access its own parliament has just revoked.
The doctrinal lineage matters here. Ali Khamenei's 2003 fatwa against nuclear weapons has been the IRGC's standard public proof for two decades that Iran does not seek the bomb. The 2026 inversion turns the same instrument: vulnerability to repeat strikes, not renunciation of weaponisation, becomes the reason the material stays. The trajectory resembles North Korea's 2009 reactor restart after the Six-Party Talks collapse, when material that had been a negotiating chip became permanent regime property and no subsequent process recovered it.
