Hello again. I'm Arun Alney. In his State of the Union address, President Trump took time once more to denounce the Iran nuclear deal, which Barack Obama considered a major achievement.

To ensure this corrupt dictatorship never acquires nuclear weapons, I withdrew the United States

from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal. Other countries, of course, are still trying to keep that deal together.

Right now, I'm in the studios of KCRW Santa Monica with Ambassador Wendy Sherman. She started life as a

social worker. She's run a successful U.S. senatorial campaign. She was special advisor on North Korea for President Clinton.

As the first woman undersecretary of state during the Obama administration,

she was the lead negotiator on the Iran nuclear deal.

Now she's written a book, appropriately titled, Not for the Faint of Heart.

Lessons in Courage, Power, and Persistence.

Madam Ambassador, welcome to To the Point.

Thank you. I'm delighted to be here, Warren.

You return in the book, you begin with the Iran nuclear deal.

You return to it again and again all the way through to the end, and you describe the longest

sustained international deliberation known, I guess, to human history at a hotel in Vienna. Will you

tell us about that? So the last round of this negotiation took place at the Pelle-Coburg in Vienna, Austria.

We had been there the previous summer and we'd been there on other occasions, but this was going to be the, let's get to the end or find out we can't round.

And indeed, Secretary Kerry spent two and a half weeks there.

So did Foreign Minister's

reef, actually a little bit longer. The longest any Secretary of State has been in

one place. And I was in that hotel for 27 very long days. I ate exactly one meal

outside of the hotel. I had an extraordinary team that some of whom had been there even longer than those

27 days. It was grueling, at times gruesome, uncertain whether we'd get to a positive end,

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