President Trump said on Monday Iran turned down “unlimited, free nuclear fuel forever for civilian purposes” because it wanted a nuclear weapon, even after US strikes under Operation Midnight Hammer obliterated key sites.
“Even after we obliterated their key nuclear sites in operation, Midnight hammer, they never negotiated in good faith, they still continue to say, we want to build nuclear we want enrichment at levels that were unacceptable when they even turned down an offer for unlimited, free nuclear fuel forever for civilian purposes. We had people offering them free nuclear fuel. They weren't interested in that because they wanted to build a nuclear weapon, Trump said in a press conference.
“So instead, the regime was trying to reconstitute its weapons program at a different site. They couldn't go back to where they were the three sites that we obliterated, but they were starting work at another site, a different site, different kind of a site, and that was protected by granite. They wanted it protected. Granite is pretty good, but they wanted it protected by a lot deeper. They wanted to go a lot deeper. And they started the process while rapidly building conventional ballistic missiles. They were going to do it all at the same time that threatened our overseas bases, and soon could have reached even our homeland,” he added.
“The regime's intention was to use this exponentially growing ballistic missile threat to make it virtually impossible to prevent them from obtaining a nuclear weapon. So as you probably saw, they had a tremendous number of missiles, most of which had now being used or destroyed and very unsuccessfully used, because we have been able, for the most part, to shoot them all down,” Trump said.