U.S. President Donald Trump said late Monday that extracting uranium from Iran would be a “long and difficult” process following U.S. strikes last year on nuclear sites in Tehran.
Writing on his platform Truth Social, Trump stated: “‘Operation Midnight Hammer’—the name given by Washington to the strikes—amounted to the complete and total destruction of Iran’s nuclear dust sites,” adding that retrieving it would therefore be a lengthy and complex task.
Trump regularly uses the term “nuclear dust” to refer to Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium, which the United States accuses Tehran of storing for the purpose of developing an atomic bomb.
However, he also at times uses the term to describe materials remaining after U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in June of last year.
The 79-year-old president maintains that Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile will eventually be handed over to the United States, despite the Iranian Foreign Ministry denying any such plans.
— AFP
