Donald Trump Tried To Launch An Attack On Iran’s Nuclear Site After Election Defeat

Donald Trump has reportedly been exploring options to attack Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks.

The president was said to have asked top advisers about the attack on the country’s nuclear facilities, according to the New York Times.

Advisers reportedly warned Trump that the move could spark war in his last two months in office and deterred him from going ahead with the military strike.

Trump’s plan was conveyed during a meeting in the Oval Office last Thursday, with several top advisers, including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, the newspaper said. .

The outgoing Republican leader was reported to have asked “if he had options to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site in the coming weeks.”

Officials told the newspaper that international inspectors reported a significant increase in the country’s stockpiles of nuclear material, prompting Trump’s concern.

A report by the International Atomic Energy Agency found that Iran now had a reserve of more than 2,442 kg of low-enriched uranium, enough to produce about two nuclear weapons.

A likely attack would be against Natanz, where the agency reported that “Tehran’s uranium reserve was now 12 times greater than allowed by the nuclear deal Trump abandoned in 2018,” three years after it was signed in an attempt to curb Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

But Trump would have left his post long ago when Iran took the several months necessary to enrich the uranium into bomb-grade material.

The agency also reported that inspectors were not allowed to look at sites suspected of containing uranium and other nuclear materials.

Former Defense official turned Democratic Rep from Michigan Elissa Slotkin said there would only be a few reasons to fire a defense secretary with 72 days left in an administration.

“One would be incompetence or wrongdoing, which doesn’t seem to be the problem with Secretary Esper,” he told the Times.

“One second would be revenge, which would be an irresponsible way of dealing with our national security.

“A third would be because the president wants to take measures that he believes his defense secretary would refuse to take, which would be alarming.”

Last month, Trump told Iran that they had been “tipped off.”

“If you fuck with us, if you do something bad to us, we will do things to you that have never been done before,” he said during an interview.
Iran has long been Trump’s concern, first reintroducing sanctions and then tightening them further after scrapping the nuclear deal.

The agreement’s European partners have struggled to keep the deal afloat despite Trump’s efforts to torpedo it, and they expect a renewed diplomatic approach after Democrat Joe Biden’s election victory on Nov. 3, though Trump refuses to admit his defeat.

The Trump administration has vowed to step up punitive measures, which some critics see as an attempt to build a “wall of sanctions” that Biden would have a hard time breaking down once he takes office.

The latest meeting showed how Trump still faces various global threats in his final weeks in office.

Rising tensions with Iran will also hurt Biden’s chances of reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear deal from which Trump withdrew in 2018, something Biden promised to accomplish within his tenure.