Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Tom Cotton (R-AR) are cautioning that the Senate will not deliver President Donald Trump the 67 votes he needs to ratify a nuclear agreement with Iran if that deal does not require the “complete dismantlement” of Tehran’s current program.

The senators issued the warning during a press conference at the Capitol on Thursday promoting their resolution affirming that the only acceptable outcome of U.S. nuclear talks with Iran would be the total dismantlement of its enrichment program. 

Asked why the approval of the Senate is necessary when Trump could technically implement a deal without the legislative branch, both senators noted that his agreement would have no guarantee of surviving in future administrations if not ratified by Congress.

“If they want the most durable and lasting kind of deal, then they want to bring it to the Senate and have it voted on as a treaty,” Cotton said. 

Graham noted another requirement of a deal getting congressional support would be its addressing Iran’s missile and terror proxy activities. He said that he told Secretary of State Marco Rubio that, “A treaty with Iran in this space is only possible if you get 67 votes …You’re not going to get a 67 votes for a treaty regarding their nuclear program unless they deal with the missile program and their terrorism activity. So is it possible? Yes, if Iran changes.”

“I would urge the Ayatollah to seriously consider what Secretary Rubio and [Middle East envoy Steve] Witkoff are proposing. You can have what you claim you want, which is a peaceful nuclear power program, if you dismantle, but it’s more than that. You can have a better relationship with the United States if you do the things that Sen. Cotton laid out. Without fundamental change, there is no pathway to a treaty in the United States Senate,” Graham added.

“To the Iranian regime: you claim all you want is a peaceful nuclear power program. You can have it, but you cannot enrich and you must dismantle,” Graham said. “And you must dismantle now.”

Graham and Cotton also said they would support Iran operating a peaceful civil nuclear program without enrichment, echoing Vice President JD Vance’s comments on Wednesday that Tehran could maintain a “civil nuclear program” but not a “nuclear weapons program,” implying it may be permitted to import lowly enriched nuclear material.

Both Republican senators praised Trump’s decision to walk away from former President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear agreement while reiterating their view that any future deal must ensure complete dismantlement. They also expressed confidence that Trump was aligned with them on this matter and would not agree to anything that excluded those terms, citing recent private conversations with him. 

“I talked to him about that this weekend,” Graham said of the president in response to a question from Jewish Insider. “He wants to pursue a diplomatic solution that achieves the goal, and the goal is to make sure they can’t have a nuclear bomb by dismantling the process that would allow them to do it, shut down the path that Sen. Cotton outlined. That is the foundation of any future relationship with Iran.”

Cotton added that he did not “foresee a situation in which we’d be voting on a deal that would resemble anything like President Obama’s deal, and therefore would be so hugely controversial.”

The duo’s tough-on-Iran pitch comes as pro-Israel Republicans on Capitol Hill have grown increasingly wary of the president’s continued negotiations with Tehran, a regime which many view as untrustworthy of maintaining a civilian nuclear program peacefully. 

“It’d be the most destabilizing thing in the world, I believe, if Iran ever acquired a nuclear weapon capability. I think the Sunni Arab world would want to go down that road also. You’d have a nuclear arms race in the Mideast, but more importantly to me, I think they would use it. I think if Iran had a nuclear weapon, they would use it as part of their radical religious regime,” Graham said. 

“The Ayatollah and his henchmen are virtual religious Nazis. They openly talk about destroying the state of Israel. They write it on the side of their missiles. And I believe them. I believe that they want to purify Islam, take over the holy sites in Saudi Arabia, wipe out the Jewish state and drive us out of the Mideast. And a nuclear weapon is part of that agenda. It’s not an insurance policy for regime survivability. It is a weapon to carry out one of the most extreme, religious ideas on the planet,” he continued. 

Cotton pointed to Iran’s massive stockpile of enriched and highly enriched uranium, its support for terrorist organizations across the Middle East and its attempted assassinations of Trump and other U.S. officials to suggest the regime’s behavior would only worsen once they had “the cover of a nuclear weapon. A nuclear Iran makes for a far more dangerous world.”

“In February of this year, the IAEA reported that Iran has between five and seven metric tons of enriched uranium and more than 600 pounds of 60% highly enriched uranium. If further enriched, this is enough uranium for six nuclear weapons. Now to be blunt, there’s no benign or good reason for Iran to have any of this, and it’s proof in and of itself that Iran cannot be trusted with key parts of the nuclear fuel cycle, particularly the infrastructure and expertise needed to enrich or reprocess uranium,” Cotton said.