Sen. John Kennedy said Friday intelligence showed that after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iranian nuclear sites in June 2025, the Islamic regime embarked on a campaign to expand its stockpiles of conventional missiles to protect its future nuclear ambitions.
On a podcast with comedian Theo Von, the Louisiana Republican said classified intelligence showed that Iran was on the path to restarting its nuclear program and that its massive stockpiles of cruise and ballistic missiles would be a hedge against U.S. or Israeli attempts to stop it.
“They were going to turn to America, and Israel, and say, ‘We are restarting our nuclear weapons program. And if you try and stop us, we are going to destroy the rest of the Middle East, and by the way, our missiles can now reach London and Paris and Germany,’” he said.
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Iran does not have an official nuclear weapons program and has publicly maintained that its enrichment facilities are used only for civilian purposes. The former supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, had issued a longstanding fatwa against the proliferation of nuclear weapons by Iran.
Mr. Kennedy said President Trump, after seeing the intelligence, was faced with a difficult decision of allowing Iran to expand its missile capacity or commit massive military resources to topple the Iranian regime.
The assertions made by Mr. Kennedy matched those made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth earlier this year.
Mr. Rubio defended Mr. Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran by asserting that Tehran was constructing a “conventional weapons” shield that would have made it impossible to destroy Iran’s enrichment facilities once the Islamic regime decided to pursue nuclear weapons.
Some critics and analysts have doubted that narrative as a reason to go to war with Iran, saying there was no clear evidence that Iran was moving toward nuclear weaponization and that the 2025 U.S. and Israeli strikes had sufficiently weakened Iran’s capability to rapidly rebuild missiles.
Additionally, the U.S. was engaged in direct negotiations with Iran on the eve of war in February, suggesting that further talks could have prevented a missile buildup.
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