Sen. Lindsey Graham called Sunday for US forces to strike anyone who comes within a certain distance of Iran’s nuclear material that has been entombed since last summer’s airstrikes on three atomic facilities by American forces.
“He wants to get the nuclear dust,” Graham (R-SC) said of President Trump on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.” “There’s another way to do it, and I talked to him about it yesterday.
A satellite image shows tunnel construction activities and a large soil pile near the Natanz nuclear complex at Pickaxe Mountain. DigitalGlobe/Getty Images“Draw a circle around where we know it’s at. Call it the circle of death. Anybody [who] goes inside the circle is going to die until we can find a way to deal with this. The goal is to make sure they can’t retrieve it. They can’t make a dirty bomb. They can’t further enrich — their enrichment capability has been obliterated at least for a couple years.”
Shortly after Graham’s interview aired, Trump posted on Truth Social: “For Iran, the Clock is Ticking, and they better get moving, FAST, or there won’t be anything left of them. TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!”
The president has repeatedly insisted upon the removal of Iran’s enriched uranium — “nuclear dust,” as he refers to it — as a part of any agreement to end the 11-week-old war.
“We really had the confines of a deal,” Trump told Fox News’ “Special Report” Friday. “No nuclear, they were going to give us the dust, nuclear dust, all the — everything we wanted. And every time they make a deal, they — the next day it’s like, we didn’t have that conversation. And that’s taken place about five times. There’s something wrong with them. Actually, they’re crazy.”
The US flag showing arrows circling Iran was posted on Donald Trump’s Truth Social. @realDonaldTrump/TruthSocial
An F-35 stealth fighter is refueled during a routine patrol over regional waters in the Middle East. @CENTCOM/X“They said very specifically, because I deal with them, I said, ‘We’re taking the nuclear dust,'” Trump claimed. “They said, ‘You can have it.’ I said, ‘We’re going to go get it. We’re not going to let you take it.’ They said, ‘We can’t take it, we don’t have the capability of taking it.’ I said, ‘Why?’ They said, ‘Because it was hit so hard.’ I mean, the mountain literally collapsed on it, a granite mountain.”
The president added in the same interview that “Space Force … has got cameras, nine different cameras in space on that site. We know everybody that moves there. We can read the name of a person. We can — if his name is Mohammed-something, and most of them are Mohammed, you can guess about 50% right, we can read his name right on his tag from space. It’s the most amazing thing.
“Anybody that goes near that space we have a tag. They haven’t done anything there. And, if they did, we would hit them very hard.”
Washington and Tehran have observed a fragile cease-fire since April 8, while the US has imposed a sea blockade on Iranian ports since April 13. The standoff has all but shut down the vital Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil passes.
