Trump says retrieving Iran’s enriched uranium is ‘more PR than necessity’

US President Donald Trump on Thursday said that the US objective of securing the enriched Uranium from Iran is a public relations exercise, while playing down the necessity of retrieving the material. While he reiterated his commitment to remove enriched uranium from Iran. During a televised interview with Fox News on Thursday, Trump said that recovering the material is unnecessary because the US maintains round-the-clock military surveillance over the sites.

“We have nine cameras on that site, on those three sites, 24 hours a day,” Trump said. “We know exactly what’s happening. Nobody’s even gotten close to it. But he said he wants to get the material out of the country, “I just feel better if I got it, actually,” Trump said. “But it’s, I think it’s more for public relations than it is for anything else.” He specifically noted it as an objective after Israel demanded it as a critical goal. The highly enriched Uranium is currently believed to be buried under the rubble of the Iranian nuclear sites, following the previous US-Israeli military strikes. He also raised the prospect of bombing the site again to make it inaccessible.

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Trump detailed the ongoing back and forth in the negotiations, saying that Iranian leadership at first agreed to hand over the material, and then backtracked from the decision. “They agreed to it, but then they take it back, and they agree,” said Trump.

US President Donald Trump and his entourage were in China for a meeting with President Xi Jinping. The conversation mentioned the West Asia war and the Hormuz crisis. Trump said that China had agreed to the establishment of free flow of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz without any sort of toll, and agreed that Tehran shouldn’t have a nuclear weapon. Beijing didn't make any specific public remark about the matter.