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Trump open to arguments for Iran’s right to pursue civilian nuclear energy
He made the remarks in an interview with NBCNEWS’s journalist Kristen Welker.
The US president said his goal in discussions about a deal with Iran is “total dismantlement” of that nation’s nuclear program.
“I think that I would be open to hearing it, you know?” Trump said. “Civilian energy, it’s called. But you know, civilian energy often leads to military wars. And we don’t want to have them have a nuclear weapon. It’s a very simple deal.”
Iran and the United States held three rounds of nuclear talks since April 12, their highest-level contact since Washington withdrew from a landmark deal with Tehran in 2018, during Trump's first term as US president.
However, the fourth round of talks initially scheduled for Saturday has been postponed due to "logistical reasons".
The US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has also called on Iran to "walk away" from uranium enrichment. In a Thursday interview with Fox News Rubio claimed that "the only countries in the world that enrich uranium are the ones that have nuclear weapons."
However, Iran’s top diplomat hit back at Rubio’s remarks, defending the country’s “right to possess the full nuclear fuel cycle”.
Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in a post on X that "Iran has every right to possess the full nuclear fuel cycle," citing Tehran's long-standing membership of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Araghchi said that there are several NPT members which enrich uranium while wholly rejecting nuclear weapons. Araghchi has previously called Iran's right to enrich uranium "non-negotiable".
Iran currently enriches uranium to 60-percent purity but below the 90 percent needed for weapons-grade material.
The US and other Western countries have long accused Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons – a claim Tehran denies, insisting that its atomic program is solely for civilian purposes.