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Washington DC: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday said that Iran has agreed to negotiate aspects of its nuclear programme. Rubio made these remarks
during a hearing before the Senate for the first time since the start of the Iran war. The US Secretary of State appeared before the Senate to make the State Department’s annual budget request. "There is the prospect before us... that, for the first time, certainly in my memory, they have agreed to negotiate aspects of their nuclear program that just a month ago, just a year ago, they were refusing to even mention, much less enter into discussions about,: Rubio said during the hearing.
The US Secretary of State said the US forces destroyed the conventional shield of Iran under which it was trying to develop nuclear weapons.
"Iran's desire to build a nuclear weapon was going to be built, was going to be effectuated behind a conventional shield. They were going to build for themselves so many missiles, so many drones, so many conventional weapons, including a navy, that at that point there's nothing you could do about it," Rubio said.
Also Read: Rubio Pushes for Full Ceasefire in Lebanon Amid Escalating Regional Tensions
"There is no Iranian navy, it lies at the bottom of the ocean and will soon, within a number of years, be prime fishing spots because they'll turn into reefs. So my whole point is that the Iranian conventional shield has been substantially eroded," he further stated.
Boasting about the Us naval blockade, Rubio said that US shut down straits for Iranian ships. "The first is they entered into a ceasefire. They agreed, we agreed to stop, but part of that agreement is that they would reopen the straits. They did not. At which point the president decided, and I think appropriately, we can't have a world in which Iran, only Iranian ships get through the straits. And so if they're going to shut down the straits for everybody, we're going to shut down the straits for them. And we have done that through a very effective blockade and, by the way, through the seizure of sanctioned ships in the Indo-Pacific as well," he said.
Rubio's statement is important because Tehran has consistently rejected US proposal to open negotiations on sensitive elements of its nuclear programme. Earlier, Trump had even asserted that Iran was prepared to hand over its enriched uranium stockpile to the United States, but Iranian authorities firmly rejected that claim. Against this backdrop, Rubio's assertion that Iran is now willing to engage in talks on certain nuclear-related issues signals a potentially significant change in the diplomatic landscape.
