Following the ousting of National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and the appointment of Secretary of State Marco Rubio as interim National Security Advisor, Rubio appeared on Fox News and provided the following remarks staking out far-reaching concessions that the U.S. wants to see in a deal:
“If Iran wants a peaceful, civil, nuclear program — meaning they want nuclear power plants like other countries in the world have — there’s a way to do it. And that is, you build the reactors and you import enriched uranium to fuel those reactors. That’s how dozens of countries around the world do it. The only countries in the world that enrich uranium are the ones that have nuclear weapons.* Iran is claiming they don’t want a weapon, but what they’re basically asking is to be the only non-weapon country in the world that’s enriching uranium. And the level at which they enrich is really not relevant per se, because if you have the ability to enrich at 3.67%, it only takes a few weeks to get to 20% and then 60% and then the 80% and 90% that you need for a weapon. And so, that really is the path forward here. Iran simply needs to say, ‘we’ve agreed to no longer enrich, we’re going to have reactors because we want to have nuclear energy and we’re going to import enriched uranium.’ This is an opportunity for them if they take it, and this is the best opportunity they’re going to have. President Trump is a president of peace — he doesn’t want a war, he doesn’t want conflict, none of us do. And there’s a path forward here. But what cannot happen is to live in a world where Iran has a nuclear weapon.”
He continued that “…If you really want to prevent a nuclear program and you’re not building a nuclear weapon, then you (Iran) should open all your nuclear facilities. One of the failures of the Obama nuclear deal with Iran is that you could not inspect military sites — well, if you’re making nuclear weapons you would probably make them on a military site. And by the way it’s been known and discovered that in the past that Iran has had a secret nuclear program that it did not disclose to the world…Iran likes to say they’re not interested in nuclear programs they like to say all they want is peaceful nuclear energy, then they should not be afraid of inspections by inspectors of any kind, including Americans. And there’s a win here for Iran. They can actually have real economic development, can have real investment in their country. But they have to walk away from sponsoring terrorists, they have to walk away from helping the Houthis, they have to walk away from building long-range missiles that have no purpose to exist other than having nuclear weapons, and they have to walk away from enrichment. These are not unreasonable requests, there are countries all over the world that have nuclear energy and don’t enrich and don’t have long-range missiles and don’t sponsor terrorism. That path is there for them, it’s the path of peace. And frankly, I pray and hope that we do everything we can to convince them that they should take it up.”
* Editor’s note: this is not factual. Other non-nuclear weapons states, including The Netherlands, Brazil and Japan, retain domestic enrichment capabilities without possessing or pursuing nuclear weapons.