Ernie Moniz: Reflections on the JCPOA

Can you maybe add a little bit to that historic timeline, wherever you'd like to jump in, but to give us, again, a little bit more of a historic framework and a setting for these negotiations? Sure.

First of all, what you say about the connections that we had unknowingly going back to the 70s with Salehi did play a very important role in the negotiations.

I will quote my now unfortunately departed good friend George Shultz, Secretary of State under President Reagan, who was involved, of course, in many negotiations.

George... as I say, died a couple of years ago on his tombstone.

It's a very simple tombstone out in the Berkshires of the Western part of Massachusetts.

And besides his name and his years, it has one little phrase on it.

Trust is the coin of the realm.

And when we spoke, he always emphasized that his negotiations, many of them, were successful because he spent the time to establish a personal level of trust with his counterpart.

That is where this background, this shared background at MIT comes in.

I did not know Salehi when he was a PhD student, but his PhD advisor, Mike Driscoll, is a very dear friend of mine.

His mentor, a Palestinian by origin at MIT on the faculty, Mujid Kazemi, he adored him.

He was a very good friend.

In fact, we co-chaired a nuclear study together.

So we had a lot of personal connections, even if we didn't know each other then.

So that was a very important part of our building a relationship It was a tough negotiation, but it was always based upon mutual respect and trust.

Secondly, another element of that personal touch, if you like, is that I think in our first meeting in Geneva in early 2015, he had just had his first grandchild.

I had two grandchildren.

And so for the next meeting, I could bring him two children's gifts with an MIT flavor.

And one of them was pretty conventional, you know, an MIT beaver doll.

But the other one was the kind of gift that only an MIT nerd could appreciate.

It was a onesie for a baby girl.

And on each shoulder, there was a chemical symbol, copper and tellurium.

You may remember copper is C-U and tellurium is T-E, so it's spelled cubed.

And so Ali loved it.

So that was a second kind of experience.