In the second week of June 2026, as American and Iranian negotiators reported that a deal was within reach, a CNN report citing five sources familiar with United States intelligence described something that points in the opposite direction. Rather than preparing to surrender its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, Tehran had spent the preceding weeks deliberately collapsing the tunnels that hold it and rigging the entrances with explosive mines. The Jerusalem Post and The Times of Israel carried the same account.

The material in question is the roughly 440 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent that the International Atomic Energy Agency has described as a short technical step from weapons grade. The proposed agreement would require Iran to relinquish it. The fortification of the site, undertaken at the precise moment that transfer was being negotiated, has been treated in parts of the coverage as a complication. It is better understood as an answer.

A buried stockpile is not a surrendered stockpile. Satellite imagery reviewed by The New York Times already shows fresh excavation near the tunnel entrances at Isfahan, where most of the material is believed to be held. Iran is not sealing this uranium in order to give it up. It is sealing it in a form that it, and only it, can later reopen.

This raises a question the negotiation has so far avoided. If a state can bury this material and recover it at a time of its own choosing, what is actually achieved by leaving it in the ground?

A civilization built on what lies beneath

Long before Iran built centrifuges, Persia built tunnels. Around three thousand years ago, on the arid plateaus of what is now Iran, engineers devised the qanat, an underground aqueduct that taps groundwater in the highlands and carries it for kilometers, by gravity alone, to the edge of a settlement. In 2016 the United Nations inscribed the Persian qanat on its World Heritage list, recognizing a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)