# Donald Trump — "The nuclear dust... psychologically we wanna get it" > [!quote] "I call it the nuclear dust, their enriched material, right?" > "The whole mountain has collapsed on top. We have cameras on it. You could make the case 'Why are you even bothering?' 'cause it's not really valuable. It's, you know, it's probably half a million dollars' worth. It's not very valuable stuff, but I think psychologically we wanna get it." > > — Donald Trump, G7 summit, France, June 16, 2026 ## Context Asked at the G7 whether Iran would be required to surrender its stockpile of highly enriched uranium, Trump reframed the material as worthless "nuclear dust" buried under a collapsed mountain — and reduced the rationale for recovering it to a "psychological" want. This reverses his repeated earlier insistence that Iran hand over its enriched uranium as a condition of any settlement following the [[Iran War 2026]]. ## Why This Matters Enriched uranium disposition was the original casus belli — the [[JCPOA]] existed precisely to cap and verify it. Recasting the stockpile as cheap junk worth "half a million dollars" minimizes the one strategic asset the war was nominally fought to eliminate, and signals that the post-war MOU may leave Iran's enrichment capacity effectively untouched. It is the clearest tell that the [[Trump-Iran MOU 2026]] secured far less than Trump had demanded. ## See Also - [[Donald Trump]] - [[Iran War 2026]] - [[Trump-Iran MOU 2026]] - [[JCPOA]]