US vice-president JD Vance is expressed during a discussion at the meeting of Munich leaders organized by the Munich security conference at the Willard hotel in Washington, DC, on May 7, 2025.
Mandel and | AFP | Getty images
Vice-president JD Vance insisted that the United States was not at war against Iran on Sunday, but with the “Iranian nuclear program”, a few hours after the United States’s end-of-evening strikes on three of the country’s nuclear sites.
Vance’s remarks come shortly after the defense secretary Pete Hegseth said that “Iran’s nuclear ambitions were erased”, following Trump administration strikes on facilities in Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan.
The Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abbas Araghchi, said on Sunday that Iran reserves all the options to defend itself following American attacks, which raises concerns of a spectacular escalation in the region.
When asked by Kristen Welker of NBC News how the United States would react to a reprisals by Iran, Vance said: “We do not want a war with Iran, we really want peace, but we want peace in the context of not having a nuclear weapons program, and that is exactly what the president accomplished last night.”
The managers of the White House, of which Trump, praised the success of the end of the evening mission to destroy the nuclear installations, but the extent of the damage was still not known on Sunday.
Pence did not say if the three nuclear sites struck by the United States had a remaining capacity.
“I will not go into sensitive intelligence on what we have seen on the field there in Iran, but we have seen a lot, and I am very confident that we have considerably delayed their development of a nuclear weapon, and that was the purpose of this attack,” said Vance.
This is a news and will be updated.
