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I'm Christopher Leiden, this is OpenSource.

In the nuclear bomb building business, breakout capacity is a measure of the time required between ordering up a bomb and having it.

In the Iran case, it's mostly the time needed to enrich enough uranium to fire a single bomb.

And it's now down to about a week in Tehran.

At the rate Iran's whirling centrifuges have been building its stockpile of fuel, most of it since our President Trump abandoned the ban on Iran's nuclear project.

Our guests, this hour, are three authorities on the longer story here.

Triedaparci wrote the inside account of the rollercoaster ride to the Iran deal of 2015.

And he's deep in the details of efforts to revive it.

Historian John Guesvinian at the University of Pennsylvania has made an epic novel out of three centuries in his masterpiece called America and Iran a history.

1720 to the President.

Hussein Benai is a political scholar in Indiana who has written an almost psychiatric account of the identities in struggle here, Iran and the U.S.

Let's start with you, Trita, if you will.

At the Vienna talks and what's begun to sound like medical reports of a patient dying.

What's at stake here? Who are the main players now? What's in dispute?

The main players, of course, are the United States and Iran.

But because the United States remains outside of the deal, they have not rejoined yet and have kept all of Trump's sanctions, the Iranians refused to engage directly with the U.S. diplomats.

And as a result, the Europeans have been given an absolutely central role as the mediators between the United States and Iran.

What's at stake at the end of the day? It's not just a nuclear deal that would prevent Iran or block all of Iran's pathways to a bomb, but it's also whether there will be a gravitation towards a military confrontation between the United States and Iran.

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