The Nuclear File That Refused to Die: How Hormuz Reordered the Negotiations with Iran

By Elijah J. Magnier –

One year after Israel and the United States claimed to have destroyed Iran’s nuclear programme, the nuclear dossier has neither been resolved nor eliminated. It has instead been overtaken by a more immediate crisis. The Strait of Hormuz now dominates negotiations because Iran has transformed the consequences of the war into leverage that affects global energy supplies, Gulf security and the economic interests of powers far beyond the Middle East.

When Israel began attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, scientists and military leaders in June 2025, followed by the American bombing of Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, President Donald Trump declared that Iran’s principal nuclear sites had been “completely and totally obliterated”. The White House subsequently defended “obliteration” as an accurate description of the damage. The declaration provided Trump with an immediate political victory. It implied that military power had accomplished what years of sanctions, inspections and negotiations had failed to achieve. If the nuclear infrastructure had truly been eliminated, there would be little left to negotiate beyond mechanisms preventing its reconstruction.

One year later, the persistence of the nuclear question demonstrates the difference between destroying installations and resolving a strategic conflict. Bombs can collapse tunnels, damage centrifuges, kill specialists and interrupt enrichment. They cannot erase scientific knowledge, establish the location of nuclear material, restore international monitoring or persuade a state to surrender permanently a capability it considers essential to its security.