Iran vows not to part with “single particle of enriched nuclear material” as standoff continues

President Trump said Wednesday the U.S. has already won the war against Iran, but when the conflict will end is a different question.

“America did not start a war with Iran,” he said at a Veterans Day event at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. “Iran has been waging war on America since 1979. This should have been taken care of a long time ago.”

“Under this administration, and it was about time, somebody fought back,” he continued. “All of us fought back. We fought back. And we seriously fought back. And we won. Just a question of when we want to end it. We want to make sure we have a total victory, not a 93% victory. It’s going to be total. It’ll take them 25 years to rebuild back what we have destroyed, and hopefully we won’t have to destroy any more of that country.” 

The president reminded Americans that the Korean War lasted much longer and cost more lives, as did the Vietnam War and the Iraq War.

As he has been saying for months, Mr. Trump said the conflict will be over soon.

Iranian security chief Mohsen Rezaei threatened to strike U.S. bases beyond the Middle East, including in Europe, if they are used for attacks against the Islamic Republic.

“If American aircraft take off from an American military base, even one located in a European country or some other distant region, to bomb Iran, we will strike those bases as well,” Rezaei told Lebanon-based Al Mayadeen TV in an interview broadcast Wednesday.

In a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday, President Trump said he does not currently see “any reason” to escalate the war.

Rezaei also said that Iran’s response to renewed U.S. attacks would “target America’s more distant military installations — including the ones we have not yet attacked,” without specifying.

“We may even strike certain islands that they assume are beyond the reach of our missiles,” he added during the interview, which was conducted in Tehran.

CBS/AFP

The Saudi-led coalition fighting Yemen’s Houthis said on Wednesday that it shot down three cruise missiles fired at Riyadh, which has been targeted for weeks by the Iran-backed group.

“Air defenses intercepted and destroyed 3 cruise missiles launched by the Houthi terrorist militia toward the Riyadh area,” coalition spokesperson Turki al-Malki posted on social media.

The latest incident comes after the Houthis damaged a skyscraper belonging to oil giant Saudi Aramco in the capital’s gleaming financial district on Sunday.

Riyadh’s international airport has also been targeted repeatedly, with deadly attacks forcing it to close for two weeks last month.

Saudi Arabia formed an international coalition to fight the Houthis in 2015, after the group’s takeover of Yemen’s capital Sanaa. 

After years of an uneasy truce, the conflict reignited in July.

Iran’s Defense Ministry on Wednesday rejected Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s latest blustery assessment of Tehran’s military capacities, calling his depiction a fabrication and insisting Iranian armed forces still had weapons stockpiled.

Iran’s weapons stockpile “far exceeds the deceptive figures fabricated by Trump and the defeated Pete,” a ministry spokesperson said, adding that the country had made use of “strategic production and upgraded technologies.”

Hegseth told reporters Tuesday that during 40 days of combat, the U.S. had struck 13,000 targets, destroying, he said, more than 80% of Iran’s nuclear industrial base.

“Their navy sunk, their air force grounded, their defense industrial base gone,” Hegseth said.

Iranian officials claimed a month ago that the country’s weapons production capacity had increased by 250% since the war began, with help from Russia and China.

Neither side has offered evidence to prove their claims, and neither the U.S. nor Iran have launched large-scale strikes since the summer. Both claim to have won the war, but despite Hegseth’s assertion on Tuesday that the Strait of Hormuz is under U.S. control, Iran continues attacking vessels daily in and near the waterway.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has relocated from his home in the Washington, D.C., area to a military base following a series of Iranian threats against his life.

“The secretary will not be deterred by the Iranian regime’s threats and remains committed to executing Operation Economic Outcast and maintaining the blockade, which together are collapsing Iran’s economy,” a Treasury Department spokesperson said.

A source familiar with the situation pointed to a Wall Street Journal story as the impetus for the move.

“After The Wall Street Journal published an article featuring an online photo that allowed the location of the secretary’s Georgetown home to be geo-located, security concerns began to increase which have now forced the secretary to relocate to a military base for his safety,” the person told CBS News.

Read more here.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian accused the U.S. on Wednesday of threatening to attack his country with America’s largest non-nuclear weapon — the “mother of all bombs” — while claiming to seek a diplomatic resolution to the war.

In a post on X, Pezeshkian criticized the U.S. for what he called an effort to “pursue diplomacy through threats.”

“No contradiction but a disgrace. Who threatens global peace and security?” he wrote.

CBS News reported in October that the White House and Pentagon had prepared plans to use the Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb, or MOAB — an acronym that has earned it the nickname used by Pezeshkian — to hit military sites in Iran if President Trump were to give the order, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The MOAB is the largest non-nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal, weighing upwards of 30,000 pounds. Mr. Trump set a precedent for its use in 2017, when it was deployed to attack an ISIS cave complex in Afghanistan. It is designed to destroy infrastructure buried deep underground.

An adviser to Iran’s supreme leader said Wednesday that the U.S. and Europe “have heard the repercussions” of the war launched jointly more than eight months ago by the U.S. and Israel.

In a post on X, Mohammad Mokhber said other nations’ participation in the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports constituted an act of war that would be recorded “in the nation’s historical memory.”

“Responsibility and the consequences of such actions will extend to all participants, regardless of geographical boundaries,” Mokhber said.

He did not mention any specific repercussions, but France has blamed Iran for nationwide cyberattacks that hit commercial refrigeration units at hundreds of grocery stores in October, spoiling thousands of tons of food and causing at least 20 fires, according to French prosecutors. 

In September, U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said Iran was believed to have “played a part” in a security incident near an air base in England that had been used by U.S. forces to launch strikes on Iran.

Iran-linked groups have also been accused of backing a series of sabotage attacks in the U.K. and Europe, including many targeting Jewish communities.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said Wednesday that two more oil tankers had struck sea mines and caught on fire in the Strait of Hormuz, the latest of what have become daily claims by Iranian forces about attacks on commercial vessels in and around the strategic waterway.

“Two oil tankers that attempted to secretly leave the Strait of Hormuz last night via an unauthorized and hazardous route, under the protection of fighter jets belonging to the plundering and aggressor U.S. military, struck naval mines and sustained massive explosions,” the IRGC said in a statement.

Iran has attacked ships for months that it accuses of trying to transit the waterway without its approval, using southern shipping lanes the U.S. military insists are safe and open. The U.S. military, meanwhile, has also struck tankers it accuses of violating its blockade of Iranian ports.

The IRGC claimed Tuesday that at least two oil tankers had caught on fire after explosions in the strait under similar circumstances, and the U.K. navy’s Maritime Trade Operations center said a tanker reported being hit by a projectile in the strait on Tuesday evening. 

The U.S.-Iran war will cost Gulf countries more than $200 billion in damage and economic losses could reach nearly four times that amount by 2030, insurer Allianz Trade said on Wednesday.

Gulf countries which hosted U.S. forces came under attack on a daily basis in the opening weeks of the war as Iran retaliated against U.S. and Israeli attacks.

“Physical damage across the region is assessed just above $200bn, mostly concentrated in Hormuz-locked economies, especially in energy infrastructure,” the insurer said in a report.

More than 80 energy facilities were hit in the war, mostly in Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain, the report said, with a third of them “severely damaged.”

Beyond physical damage to energy infrastructure, the war has affected other sectors like tourism and real estate, which will see slower growth over the years.

“The total cost of the war for the GCC is set to reach $790bn, a cumulative gap of 5.9 percent of GDP relative to the pre-war trend through 2030,” the report said.

“This reflects the cumulative loss of economic output over 2026-30, the difference between what the region was forecast to produce on its pre-war growth trend and what it is now projected to produce post-war,” it said.

CBS/AFP

A top Iranian security official insisted Wednesday that Tehran will not allow the removal of any of its enriched nuclear material.

Iranian state broadcaster IRIB cited Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council Mohsen Rezaei as saying Tehran “will not remove even a single particle of enriched nuclear material from the country.”

The White House has argued the war against Iran was necessary to prevent the Islamic Republic from obtaining a nuclear weapon, which the regime has always denied trying to do. 

The Trump administration has pushed for a final peace deal that would include Iran agreeing to give up its stockpile of highly-enriched uranium and accept limits on its nuclear program overall. 

The U.S. wants an initial ceasefire deal to include negotiations on the nuclear issue, but Tehran has refused that precondition, insisting such discussions can only take place once fighting is formally halted – on all fronts, including in Lebanon.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reiterated the White House’s position on Iran’s nuclear program, telling reporters that “crazy Islamists in Tehran will never ever have a nuclear weapon.”

Hours after the Iranian foreign ministry officially rejected any responsibility for grocery store refrigerators being hacked across the country, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi added insult to injury.

“Unable to manage fridges let alone addressing grievances of its people, French government is shifting blame for its failures onto others,” Araghchi wrote on X.

Araghchi also added Iran did not use its power to support “massacres in Gaza or bombings of schools and hospitals.”

On Monday, the Paris Prosecutor’s Office said investigators had evidence Iran was behind the Oct. 11 hack, which significantly turned up the temperature in refrigerators and spoiled tons of food as well as causing about 20 fires. About 700 supermarkets across the country were targeted, the prosecutor’s office said.

The Iranian foreign ministry, in its official statement Tuesday, said it “strongly rejects the baseless accusations made by the French government against Iran concerning alleged involvement in sabotage activities in France.”