'Find an offramp — quickly': Expert delivers grim warning to Trump
One foreign policy expert is warning President Donald Trump that he should "find an off-ramp" in his conflict with Iran.
National security analyst Joe Cirincione, who serves as the vice chair of the board of directors of the Center for International Policy, told MSNBC on Monday afternoon that Iran appears to be taking steps forward to publicly ramp up its effort to build nuclear weapons.
MSNBC host Katy Tur cited reports that the Iranian parliament agreed to suspend cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, which seeks to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy.
"Well, that could be seen as a step towards their withdrawal from the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. They are a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty," Cirincione explained. "It bans them from having nuclear weapons. This is the kind of step they would take if they were, in fact, intending to move towards the construction of a nuclear bomb."
Tur asked if that was the case, what advice he would give the United States.
"Find an off ramp quickly, as the IAEA director general, Rafael Mariano Grossi, told the U.N. Security Council over the weekend, it looks like Iran has," Cirincione urged.
"In fact," he added, they "moved some of their highly enriched uranium gas out of the facilities that we're in. We know from satellite imagery, we could see trucks moving into some of these facilities before the airstrikes, apparently moving some of this gas. We don't know where it is. The IAEA doesn't know where it is. We've seen no indication from the administration that they know where it is. And this is the danger. While these strikes have certainly conducted damage to the facilities, as you were just discussing, it doesn't appear that we got the 400 kg of 60% enriched uranium."
He noted that it could be "fed back into centrifuges" at other sites, which are unknown to the intelligence community. They could convert it to the core of a bomb within five days and "build 10 bombs" within two weeks. "They may have already done it."
See his clip in the video below or at the link here.
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