STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
Ambassador John Bolton has been following all of this. He was national security adviser in the first Trump administration. He later wrote a memoir, sharply critical of Trump, and managed to publish it despite the president's effort to block it in court. In that same book, Bolton disclosed that he had advised Trump to launch a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. Ambassador Bolton, welcome back to the program.
JOHN BOLTON: Thanks for having me. Glad to be here.
INSKEEP: Is the strike the president ordered the other day approximately the strike you wanted once upon a time?
BOLTON: Well, times have changed since I recommended that. These are the targets that we struck were clearly targets that deserved to be struck. The Israelis had done a lot of work on other Iranian nuclear facilities. But, ultimately, the objective should be to destroy the program.
INSKEEP: Do you assume that work is now done?
BOLTON: No, I don't. I mean, I know there - obviously, there's a big debate about were they obliterated? Were they not? So on and so forth. I mean, just - this is going to be resolved over time as new information comes in. The best - you know, the most neutral observer we've got at the moment is the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. I don't think anybody on the left or the right would say he's a tool of Donald Trump's. And the term he has used is - just today, is that the Iranian program has suffered, quote, "enormous damage." And said, as well, that he thought the centrifuges at Fordo were inoperable. That's the opinion of the IAEA director general. I'm satisfied with that for now.
INSKEEP: So it seems that a lot of damage was done, and a lot of munitions were dropped. At the same time, I think we've heard from the IAEA and others that Iran had disclosed the existence of some new nuclear facility that wasn't bombed in this attack. And there's the question of whether uranium got away. Do you think they do have the means to do something?
BOLTON: Well, this is - the new development is at a place called Pickaxe Mountain. Kind of a strange name, but right near Natanz. It had been suspected for a long time. And for years, the government of Iran had simply stonewalled the IAEA. This has been their pattern. It's why they are so untrustworthy. Look, the effort to destroy a complex program involves breaking the links in the nuclear fuel cycle at multiple points so that it is ultimately a project of years to put it back together. That's why I'm happy.
Finally, I've been spending a long time emphasizing the uranium conversion facility at Isfahan. It takes uranium as a solid, turns it into a gas, chemically so it can go through the centrifuges. And then later takes the gas and makes it into a metal for fuel fabrication or nuclear weapons work. That was a surface facility. It has been destroyed. That's a key link that's broken. It is certainly the case that we can't account for all of the enriched uranium. And that's one reason why I wouldn't have terminated the air campaign as soon as Trump did. I think there was clearly more work to do.
INSKEEP: You would have bombed more, you're saying. That's very interesting. I want to...
BOLTON: Well, I certainly would have, and I would have kept Iran under very intense surveillance to see what they might be trying to move around. I hope that part, anyway, is still part of the program with both Israel and the United States, that we're watching very closely what the people running the nuclear program are doing.
INSKEEP: I want to ask about what some people have seen as a contradiction here. The president ran for office, saying he was against starting new wars. He then, early in his term, wanted to deal with Iran over its nuclear program. And then he abruptly joined Israel's war against Iran, which dismayed a lot of his own allies. Do you think - even if you think this was fundamentally the right decision, do you think this process has been conducted in the most rational and responsible way?
BOLTON: Of course not. That's not the way Trump governs. But, you know, we are where we are at this moment, and he kind of zigged into doing the right thing. Then he zagged back out by terminating it too early. He'll probably zig and zag for the next six or eight months, as well. That's the way he is. He doesn't have a national security strategy. He doesn't really even do policy the way we normally understand that.
INSKEEP: I have understood him to say both that he would be happy to make a deal with Iran now and that he has no interest in a deal with Iran. Would you have him make some agreement if one was even possible at this point?
BOLTON: No, I don't think there is any deal that the United States would find acceptable with this regime, which is why I've always believed that destroying the nuclear weapons program was an important step. But the only long-term answer to get peace and stability in the Middle East and around the world is to overthrow the Ayatollahs.
INSKEEP: Which has been short of what the United States has been willing to try. In about 15 seconds, how could this all still go wrong?
BOLTON: Well, it could be that Iran has a big part of its program under a mountain in North Korea. That's something I've worried about for a long time. We don't know the answer to that.
INSKEEP: Ambassador Bolton, pleasure talking with you again. Thanks so much.
BOLTON: Thank you.
INSKEEP: John Bolton served as national security adviser during the first Trump administration. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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