Trump warns no deal if Iran pursues nuclear weapons

US President Donald Trump said Wednesday that there will be no peace deal if Iran continues to pursue nuclear weapons but added that the war “can be over very soon.”

“They cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Trump told Fox Business in an interview. “If they don’t, we’re not making a deal.”

“This whole thing about it was, is really about no nuclear, they cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said, adding that Iran has been “hit very hard.”

“We could take out every one of their bridges in one hour. We could take out every one of their power plants, electric power plants, in one hour. We don't want to do that,” he said, adding: “We'll see what happens.”

Repeating his claim that Iran posed a threat, he said Tehran was “going over to take over the Middle East, and we stopped them,” saying that it would have a nuclear weapon and “would have used it.”

***He added that “I think they want to make a deal very badly.”

Talks were held in the Pakistani capital Islamabad over the weekend to permanently end the US-Israeli war on Iran that began on Feb. 28, but no agreement was reached. Efforts to hold another round of talks are underway.

Pakistan, on April 8, brokered a two-week ceasefire, which is still holding.

The US president said that in the war against Iran, “We've had no help… zero from NATO. We're there for them. They're not there for us.”

“What it means if they're not there for us here, they're not going to be going to be there for us. So why are we? Why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on NATO if they're not going to be with us?”

Trump said the US does not have the "same relationship" with anyone and that they have "turned us down for helping with this Iran situation."

Trump also said he gets along “very well” with Chinese President Xi Jinping, adding that Xi told him Beijing is not supplying weapons to Iran, denying press reports.

“I wrote him a letter asking him not to do that,” Trump said, adding that Xi responded “that essentially he’s not doing that.”

Trump also mentioned that China and the US regularly carry out cyberattacks against each other, explaining: “We do them. They do us, it's been like that for a long time … China's China. They're never easy.”

He claimed that the US is ahead of China in economy, artificial intelligence, space technologies, and military, adding that “we're building plans that nobody ever imagined before, and it's going to be a tremendous bigger than the internet. It's going to be tremendous.”