Ted Cruz: ‘No indication’ that Iran was ‘close to getting nuclear weapons’

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Sunday said there was “no indication” that Tehran was “close to getting nuclear weapons” after the United States struck several Iranian nuclear facilities in June, adding that he argued to President Trump that the time was right for a military strike to possibly effect regime change.

“We launched targeted bombs at the end of the 12-Day War where we dropped the equivalent of about a third of a nuclear weapon on those underground facilities. Facilities like Fordow, built into the base of a mountain,” Cruz told Margaret Brennan on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“We took them out last year,” Cruz said of Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Cruz declared that U.S. forces used bunker-buster bombs, which Israel doesn’t have, to destroy what he called Iran’s “ongoing nuclear program” in June.

“We took out the vast majority of that at the end of the 12-Day War,” he said, referring to Operation Midnight Hammer, which Trump ordered last year.

Cruz also said he was not aware of any intelligence about the progress that Iran made rebuilding its nuclear facilities since the U.S. strikes, adding that he urged Trump shortly before the attack to take advantage of what he and other experts saw as the Iranian regime’s historic weakness.

“I don’t have present-day intelligence on what progress they had made toward rebuilding nuclear weapons since we bombed their facilities,” Cruz said on CBS. “I have no indication that they were anywhere close to getting nuclear weapons because our bombing was devastating.”

Cruz, after speaking with Trump, last week predicted that U.S. strikes on Iran could happen in the next few days.

“I said, ‘Listen, the regime has never been weaker. They are teetering,’” he said at the time during an interview with CNBC, predicting that the regimes in Iran, Venezuela and Cuba, which have all been long hostile to the United States, could soon be replaced.

“We are at a moment … where in the next six months we could realistically see the regimes in Iran, Venezuela and Cuba all fall and we could see them replaced with governments that want to be friendly with America,” he said.

“If that happened, that would be the biggest geopolitical shift since the fall of the Berlin Wall,” he said.

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