Vance: US decision to strike Iranian nuclear sites stemmed from its own intel

US Vice President JD Vance says he believes Iran’s nuclear program has been set back “many years” by Washington’s strikes this morning, and that the operation was motivated by US intelligence assessments, not Israeli ones.

Vance tells NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he feels “very confident that we’ve substantially delayed [Iran’s] development of a nuclear weapon,” and that, while he can’t provide an official assessment, he suspects it would be “many, many years” now before Iran could reach the bomb.

Asked if US President Donald Trump gave the go-ahead for the operation based on US or Israeli intelligence assessments of Iran’s nuclear capabilities, Vance says, “it was our intelligence” that led to the decision.

“Of course we share intelligence with a lot of agencies, British, Israeli and so forth, but it was our intelligence that motivated us to act,” says the vice president.

Vance explains that the US identified that “Iran was producing highly enriched uranium that was only consistent with them wanting to build a nuclear weapon,” and while “there’s of course an open question about whether they were weeks away or whether they were months away… they were way too close to a nuclear weapon for the comfort of the president of the United States, which is why he chose this action.”

The US vice president emphasizes that, although the US felt nuclear talks with Iran were somewhat productive in March, by mid-May, “the Iranians seemed to be stonewalling” the negotiations, which was “really the hidden story here… The Iranians stopped negotiating in good faith, and that was the real catalyst” for the decision to attack.

Asked if the US would support an Israeli assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Vance claims that such a move is “up to the Israelis” and reiterates that the US position is “we don’t want a regime change.”