Kerry: ‘The World Is Safer Today’

Monday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Secretary of State John Kerry insisted that despite all of Iran’s saber-rattling in the wake of it’s deal to curb its nuclear intentions, the world is still safer as a result of the deal.

According to Kerry, the deal exposes more about Iran’s nuclear program. As far as Iran’s recent activities, Kerry said there were still sanctions in place addressing those.

“They are safer today. The world is safer today,” Kerry replied. “Before we had this agreement, Iran had a completely invisible, unaccountable, unverified nuclear program. They had 19,000 centrifuges. They had enough nuclear material to make 10 to 12 bombs and they were hurtling towards a program that was going to create inevitability of confrontation. Today that is not true. That is entirely reversed. Not only do we now have verification that is unprecedented, but they have rolled back their program, sent their nuclear material out of the country, destroyed their plutonium reactor, ceased any enrichment activity at their hidden facility and allowed 130 additional inspectors from the IAEA to come into the country to verify this going forward.”

“We have gone from a two-month breakout period, Joe [Scarborough], to over-years breakout period now,” he continued. “So they are absolutely safer. And the question now is will we able to work together with our allies to deal with the other issues of concern with respect to Iran? And there are other issues and we have raised those with Iran. it is not — it is not, you know, sort of a fantasy on the part of the Saudi Arabians or others in the region that Iran’s activities in the region have been disquieting to everybody, including us, which was why the missiles sanctions were left in place, the human rights sanctions were left in place and we will continue now, I hope, to try to work at the resolution of those kind of issues. I’m going to be in Saudi Arabia on Saturday this week. I met in London with the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia. We had a very good conversation about this.”

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor