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WASHINGTON, DC: President Donald Trump, with two months remaining in office, asked last week for options to attack Iran’s main nuclear site, but ultimately decided not to take the dramatic step, a U.S. official said Monday (May 16). November).
Trump made the request during a meeting in the Oval Office Thursday with his top national security advisers, including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, new Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller and General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the official said.
Trump, who has refused to budge and is challenging the results of the November 3 presidential election, will hand over power to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden on January 20.
The official confirmed the account of the meeting in the New York Times, which reported that advisers persuaded Trump not to go ahead with a strike over the risk of a broader conflict.
“He asked for options. They gave him the scenarios and finally decided not to go ahead,” the official said.
The White House declined to comment.
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A view of a damaged building after a fire broke out at Iran’s Natanz Nuclear Facility in Isfahan on July 2, 2020 (Photo: Atomic Energy Organization of Iran / West Asia News Agency via REUTERS)
Trump has spent the four years of his presidency engaging in aggressive policy against Iran, withdrawing in 2018 from the Iran nuclear deal brokered by his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, and imposing economic sanctions against a wide variety of Iranian targets.
Trump’s request for options came a day after a UN watchdog report showed Iran had finished moving a first cascade of advanced centrifuges from an above-ground plant at its main uranium enrichment site to an underground one, in a further violation of its 2015 great powers nuclear deal.
Alireza Miryousefi, a spokesman for Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York, said Iran’s nuclear program is purely for peaceful purposes and civilian use and that Trump’s policies have not changed that. “However, Iran has shown itself capable of using its legitimate military might to prevent or respond to any melancholy adventure by any aggressor,” he added.
Iran’s stocks of 2.4 tonnes of low-enriched uranium are now well above the 202.8 kg limit of the agreement. It produced 337.5 kg in the quarter, less than the more than 500 kg recorded in the previous two quarters by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
In January, Trump ordered a US drone strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani at the Baghdad airport. But he has turned away from the broader military conflicts and has sought to withdraw US troops from global hotspots in accordance with a promise to stop what he calls “endless wars.”
An attack on Iran’s main nuclear site in Natanz could spark a regional conflict and pose a serious foreign policy challenge for Biden.
Biden’s transition team, which has not had access to national security intelligence due to the Trump administration’s refusal to begin the transition, declined to comment.
