The White House declined to comment.
Washington:
President Donald Trump asked for options to attack Iran’s main nuclear site last week, but ultimately decided not to take this dramatic step, a US official said on Monday.
Trump made the request in a meeting Thursday with his top national security aides, including Vice President Mike Pence, his new acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller and General Mark Milley, chairman of heads of state -Joint Staff, said the official.
The official confirmed the minutes of the meeting in The New York Times, which reported that advisers persuaded Trump not to go on strike because of the risk of a wider conflict.
“He asked for options. They gave him the scripts and he ultimately decided not to go ahead,” the official said.
The White House declined to comment.
Trump spent the four years of his presidency engaging in an aggressive policy against Iran, withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal brokered by his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, and imposing economic sanctions against a wide variety of targets Iranian.
Trump, who is challenging the November 3 presidential election results, is due to hand power over to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden on January 20.
Its request for options came a day after a UN atomic surveillance report showed that Iran had finished moving a first cascade of advanced centrifuges from an air plant to its main enrichment site in uranium to an underground plant, in a further violation of its nuclear deal. with great powers.
Iran’s stockpile of 2.4 tonnes of low enriched uranium is now well above the deal’s 202.8 kg limit. 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 U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian military general Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad airport.
But he has avoided broader military conflicts and has sought to withdraw US troops from global hotspots on a promise to end what he calls “endless wars.”
A strike on Iran’s main nuclear site in Natanz could spark regional conflict and pose a serious foreign policy challenge for Biden.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
