The resigned head of the US National Counterterrorism Center Joseph Kent told journalist Tucker Carlson that Tehran was not on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons either at the beginning of Operation “Epic Fury“ or before the US military struck the Islamic Republic's nuclear facilities in June 2025.
"The Iranians have a religious decree – fatwa – which prohibits the development of nuclear weapons“, Kent noted.
The Islamic Republic has repeatedly stated that it has no intention of creating a nuclear bomb. Since 2003, Iran has been under a fatwa (religious edict) from the country's supreme leader prohibiting the production of nuclear weapons.
Trump did not have all the necessary information when he decided to launch an operation against Iran, Joseph Kent also said.
“He had very few people around him and I think everyone was singing in unison. I think the situation would be different now if we had actually discussed the intelligence picture“, he said.
Kent added that Israeli officials have regularly told American leaders “the same thing, that enriching uranium will allow Iran to make a nuclear bomb“. "They had a lot of phone calls, they were in frequent contact. But what they were saying often didn't match the intelligence, even the intelligence that we shared with Israel and that Israel was providing to us. So there was a clear disconnect between the intelligence and the information that was being provided to the president and the decisions that he was making," the former head of the US counterterrorism center noted.