Iran mocks Trump with missile launches as US plans war exit without touching Iran’s uranium
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The myriad contradictions in the US President Donald Trump’s claims ever since the war he began at the behest of Israel were subjects of mockery, owing to the incongruity in assertions that he would shift day by day, and the most recent claim that the US-Israel-led war had decimated Iran’s missile-launching facilities was countered with a video in which several missile launch sites targeting Israel could be seen.
Meanwhile, Trump also appeared to dodge the war aims, as his response to a reporter about Iran’s nuclear enrichment, in the wake of the US plan to conclude the war, was that he did not care much about the enrichment, which left questions over the war’s rationale.
Iran’s response with missiles followed Donald Trump’s televised address to the nation, where he declared a major win over Iran in the war called Operation Epic Fury, claiming that its naval and aerial capabilities had been destroyed, its leadership eliminated, and its capacity to deploy missiles and drones drastically curtailed.
The claims appeared to be couched in hyperbolic language and framed as unprecedented military success, yet were swiftly punctured by Iran’s public demonstration of operational launches.
The rhetorical escalation intensified when United States Secretary Pete Hegseth echoed Trump’s warning that Iran would be driven “back to the Stone Age”, prompting the Iranian consulate to highlight the inconsistency between calls for Iran to become “great again” and threats of civilisational regression, while invoking the antiquity of Persian empires to underscore the historical continuity of Iranian statehood.
Trump appeared to retreat from one of the war’s declared objectives, as he dismissed concerns over Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, remarking that the material was buried deep underground and could be monitored by satellite.
His assertion that he did not “care” about the stockpile, coupled with a conditional threat of renewed missile strikes should Iran attempt to access it, seemed to rule out a risky extraction mission reportedly under Pentagon consideration, and thereby cast doubt on earlier claims that preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons constituted a principal war aim.
Experts warned that leaving approximately 440 kilograms of highly enriched uranium under Iranian control would leave Tehran closer to nuclear weapons capability than the diplomatic settlement previously under discussion, which had envisaged dilution of enriched material, a pause in enrichment, and restoration of comprehensive monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency.