Analysis: Sen. Vance’s nonsensical claims on Iran’s nuclear program, CNN.com

10:40 p.m. EDT, October 1, 2024 Analysis: Sen. Vance’s nonsensical claims on Iran’s nuclear program From CNN's Peter Bergen During the debate, Sen. JD Vance and Gov. Tim Waltz clashed on the issue of Iran. Vance claimed that former President Donald Trump had made the world “more secure” by taking the United States out of the Iranian nuclear deal in 2018 that had been negotiated by the Obama administration three years earlier, which kept the Iranians from enriching uranium above around 4%. To make nuclear weapons you need around 90% enriched uranium. Just hours after Iran had sent missiles against Israeli targets, Vance claimed that the Trump administration’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal had made the world more secure. This is simply nonsense, and that’s according to Trump’s own top intelligence official, the Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, a former Republican senator, who testified before a Congressional committee in 2019 that the Obama-negotiated nuclear deal was working. Trump soon punched back, tweeting “The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong!” In fact, because the Trump administration pulled out of the Iranian nuclear deal, the United Nations says that Iran today has enough fissile material to make several nuclear weapons. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said publicly in July that Iran is now probably “one or two weeks” from being able to make a nuclear weapon. The Middle East is now a more volatile place than in decades and the fact that Iran is just weeks away from having nuclear weapons is a very dangerous place to be. And that is at least in part on Trump whatever Vance claimed in Tuesday’s debate.