This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, August 15th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What are the costs and benefits of the Iran nuclear deal so far will Donald Trump as promised rip up the deal in pursuit of a presently

non-existent better deal.

Ariantabatibi is author of the new Cato paper Preserving Iran nuclear deal, perils and prospects.

We spoke earlier this month.

What were the successes of the Iran deal?

Well, from a technical perspective, the deal rolls back a number of key elements and very sensitive

elements of the Iranian nuclear program.

And those elements are usually used to develop a nuclear weapon.

If a country wants to pursue a nuclear weapon,

it has to go down one of two paths, essentially. The first one is

uranium enrichment. And on that, the nuclear deal has placed a number of limitations for Iran, which means that

Iran can enrich some uranium, but it can only enrich it up to a certain level

and it can only do it using a number of centrifuges, which means that it can't really,

for the foreseeable future, develop a nuclear weapon using enriched uranium.

The second path is the plutonium path,

and that has been essentially stopped

by the nuclear deal. The third thing a country can do though is to procure a

nuclear weapon to go and purchase it from somewhere else to to steal it from

from another country, for example.

And on that, too, the nuclear deal does a fair bit.

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