President Donald Trump on Monday outlined the conditions Iran would have to meet for Operation Epic Fury to end.
Trump announced Monday morning that talks had started between the United States and Iran, pausing a planned strike on Iranian power plants for five days. Trump spoke to reporters before boarding Air Force One en route to an event in Memphis.
“We’re looking for all of the things that we’ve been talking about,” Trump told reporters. “We want to see no nuclear bomb, no nuclear weapon, not even close to it, low-key on the missiles. We want to see peace in the Middle East. We want the nuclear dust, we’re going to want that, and I think we’re going to get that.”
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“We’ve agreed to that, yes, we’ve agreed to that uranium … we want no enrichment, but we also want the enriched uranium,” Trump continued. “If this happens, it’s a great start for Iran to build itself back, and it’s everything that we want, and it’s also great for Israel and it’s great for the other Middle Eastern countries, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, all of them, Kuwait and Bahrain in particular, so it’s great for all of them.”
Trump announced the start of Operation Epic Fury in a Feb. 28 post on Truth Social after negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program collapsed. Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East envoy, said in a March 2 interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity that Iranian diplomats declared the regime would keep enriching uranium and claimed to already possess enough material for nearly a dozen “dirty” weapons.
Trump later told reporters during the gaggle that the United States would take custody of the materials in question.
“It’s very easy,” he told reporters. “If we have a deal with them, we’re going down and we’ll take it ourselves.”
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth refused to rule out the use of ground troops to seize Iranian nuclear materials during a March 13 press briefing.
“We’ve said from the beginning, denying Iran nuclear weapons is a core mission. We have, we retain options across the spectrum to ensure that they never do, and President Trump has said that,” Hegseth told reporters.
“I would never tell this group or the world what we’re willing to do or how far we’re willing to go, but we have options for sure,” Hegseth said later in the briefing.
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