President Trump said Wednesday that US officials will meet with their Iranian counterparts next week — following Saturday’s US airstrikes that he said buried the nation’s enriched uranium under “30 stories” of rubble.
“We’re going to talk to them next week, with Iran. We may sign an agreement. I don’t know,” Trump said at a press conference following the annual NATO summit at The Hague.
Trump did not say where the meeting would occur or who would rep the US after he helped broker a cease-fire Monday between Iran and Israel, ending what he has dubbed the “12-Day War.”
“I could get a statement that they’re not going to go nuclear. We’re probably going to ask for that, but they’re not going to be doing it anyway.”
Trump then reiterated: “We may sign an agreement, [but] I don’t care if I have an agreement or not.”
The president also said he believes nearly 900 pounds of enriched uranium remain underneath 300 feet of debris at the Fordow enrichment site, which was hit with a dozen 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs.
“We think everything nuclear is down there, they didn’t take it out,” he said.
“We think we hit them so hard and so fast, they didn’t get to move. And if you knew about that material, it’s very hard and very dangerous to move,” the president said.
“They call it dust, but it’s very heavy, it’s very, very hard to move. And they were way down. You know, they were 30 stories down. They’re literally 30-35 stories down underground. We think it’s covered with granite, concrete and steel.”
International Atomic Energy Agency director Rafael Grossi said Tuesday that the United Nations agency didn’t know where the uranium was located.
“We do not have information of the whereabouts of this material,” Grossi told Fox News, though he noted it is enriched to 60% purity, less than the 90-93% needed for nuclear weapons.
Trump, 79, used the press conference before departing Europe to rip the “real scum” in the press who he accused of downplaying the impact of his air raids on Iran, which he likened to the US dropping atomic weapons on Japan to end World War II in 1945.
“It was so bad that they ended the war,” he said of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Trump also argued a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency assessment that the strikes may not have set back Iran’s nuclear program more than a few months was merely “a guess” because “they didn’t see it.”
The Israel Atomic Energy Commission released a statement Wednesday backing the effectiveness of the Fordow strike, saying the bunker busters “destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable.
“We assess that the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, combined with Israeli strikes on other elements of Iran’s military nuclear program, has set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.”
Another unresolved detail is US enforcement of oil sanctions against Iran, enforcement of which was tightened this year by Trump.
Trump wrote Tuesday on social media that “China can now continue to purchase Oil from Iran,” and he didn’t clarify his meaning Wednesday other than to say “they’re going to need money to put that country back in shape. We want to see that happen.”
