‘Iran just basically put its wish list into this’: The Trump-Iran agreement gives Iran a free pass on nuclear treaty violations pending final deal

President Donald Trump may have signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran to end the war late Wednesday, but it doesn’t resolve a much darker issue: Iran’s nuclear weapons.  

While Iran affirms that it won’t develop nuclear weapons in the agreement, curbing the actual process of making those weapons—stockpiling and enriching uranium—is left to be finalized later. Crucially, the MOU states that in the meantime, Iran will “maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program.”

“What the negotiators are trying to capture is that Iran takes no further advances with its nuclear program, but they should have considered that the status quo is pretty poor,” Andrea Stricker, a national security expert specializing in nuclear weapons, told Fortune. “If I were negotiating, I would have insisted that restoration of monitoring and access would have to be something that Iran had to do in the MOU because it’s so important.”

Iran hasn’t allowed the UN watchdog responsible for monitoring nuclear materials—the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)—access to its nuclear facilities since its 12-day war with the U.S. and Israel last June, meaning the IAEA hasn’t been able to verify the s...