‘Iranian nuclear bomb’ lie used to justify military aggression: Spox
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baqaei said on Monday that US officials, under the influence of Israel, have spent decades to instill “a big lie called Iran’s nuclear bomb” into their public opinion and then used it as a pretext for military aggression against Iran.
Iran has never possessed nuclear weapons and has never sought to acquire them, the spokesman said, describing this as part of the reality of the past two decades.
Another part of that reality, he said, was that Iran had engaged in negotiations in good faith and signed an agreement in 2015, only for the United States to withdraw from it three years later without any reason or justification and subsequently impose sweeping measures against Iran.
“We hope the American public becomes aware of these realities,” he said.
Baqaei also questioned Washington’s repeated claims that it had completely destroyed Iran’s nuclear program, saying the United States had launched another military attack against Iran just eight months after making that assertion.
“What is interesting is that they continue to repeat the same claim,” he said.
Washington, he added, had fabricated a lie from the outset and spent the past 30 years repeatedly promoting it.
“Repeating a lie does not turn it into the truth,” he said.
Baqaei was responding to a question about recent remarks by the former US president Barack Obama who has said Iran didn’t have nuclear weapons.
The US, alongside Israel, started launching strikes against Iran in late February, with Trump claiming that Americans were in imminent danger over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
But Obama argued that the issue had already been dealt with under his administration — until Trump unraveled it.
“Let’s think about this Iran war. The original rationale was, we’re going to go in there and get them to give up their nuclear program, their nuclear weapons,” Obama said. “Now, the thing was, Iran didn’t have nuclear weapons, because I put a deal in place that everybody acknowledged — kept them from getting nukes. And I didn’t have to fire a missile to do it; I just had to engage in diplomacy.”
Iran has always underlined that it has never sought to build nuclear weapons and its nuclear program is solely
Iran has long insisted it has never sought to build nuclear weapons and its nuclear program is solely for civilian purposes.