A U.S. intelligence report suggests that Iran’s nuclear program has been set back by only a few months after U.S. strikes, and was not “completely and fully obliterated” as U.S. President Donald Trump has said, according to two people familiar with the early assessment.
The report issued by the U.S. Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) on Monday contradicts statements from Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the status of Iran’s nuclear facilities. According to the people, the report found that while the Saturday strikes at the Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites did significant damage, the sites were not totally destroyed. The people were not authorized to address the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The U.S. has held out hope of restarting negotiations with Iran to convince it to give up its nuclear program entirely, but some experts fear that the U.S. strikes — and the potential of Iran retaining some of its capabilities — could push Tehran toward developing a functioning weapon.
The assessment also suggests that at least some of Iran’s highly enriched uranium, necessary for creating a nuclear weapon, was moved out of multiple sites before the strikes and survived, according to the people. It also found that Iran’s centrifuges, which are required to further enrich uranium to weapons-grade levels, are largely intact.
At the deeply buried Fordow uranium enrichment plant, where U.S. B-2 stealth bombers dropped several 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs, the entrance collapsed but the underground infrastructure was not destroyed, the assessment found. The people said intelligence officials had warned of this outcome in previous assessments ahead of the strike on Fordow.
White House pushes back
The White House strongly pushed back on the DIA assessment, calling it “flat-out wrong.”
“The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “Everyone knows what happens when you drop 14 30,000-pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
U.S. President Donald Trump posted a screenshot of a message sent to him from NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on social media Tuesday. In the text exchange, Rutte congratulated him for his ‘decisive action’ in Iran and getting all NATO allies to agree to spend at least five per cent of their GDP on defence.
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) declined to comment on the DIA assessment. ODNI co-ordinates the work of the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies, including the DIA, which is the intelligence arm of the U.S. Defence Department, responsible for producing intelligence on foreign militaries and the capabilities of adversaries. The Israeli government also has not released any official assessments of the U.S. strikes.
David Albright, a former UN nuclear inspector, said that based on post-strike commercial satellite imagery, he believed the U.S. attack effectively destroyed Iran’s uranium enrichment program for now, but failed to eliminate the longer-term threat.
“Iran retains an ability to break out and produce weapon-grade uranium,” Albright, the head of the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security, said in a post on X.
Netanyahu applauds ‘historic’ U.S. involvement
Trump has said in comments and posts on social media in recent days, including Tuesday, that the strikes “totally destroyed” the sites and that Iran will never rebuild its nuclear facilities.
In a televised statement Tuesday, Netanyahu said, “For dozens of years I promised you that Iran would not have nuclear weapons and indeed … we brought to ruin Iran’s nuclear program.”
He said the U.S. joining Israel was “historic” and thanked Trump.
The intelligence assessment was first reported by CNN on Tuesday. Reuters and the New York Times also published reports on the DIA assessment, as did the ABC, CBS and NBC news networks.
Outside experts had suspected Iran had likely already hidden the core components of its nuclear program as it stared down the possibility that American bunker-buster bombs could be used on its nuclear sites.
Bulldozers and trucks visible in satellite imagery taken just days before the strikes have fuelled speculation among experts that Iran may have transferred its stockpile of enriched uranium to an unknown location. And the incomplete destruction of the nuclear sites could still leave the country with the capacity to spin up weapons-grade uranium and develop a bomb.
Iran has maintained that its nuclear program is peaceful, but it has enriched significant quantities of uranium beyond the levels required for any civilian use. The U.S. and others assessed prior to the U.S. strikes that Iran’s theocratic leadership had not yet ordered the country to pursue an operational nuclear weapons, but the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly warned that Iran has enough enriched uranium to make several nuclear bombs should it choose to do so.
American satellite imagery and analysis firm Maxar Technologies said its satellites photographed trucks and bulldozers at the Fordow site beginning on June 19, three days before the Americans struck.
Subsequent imagery “revealed that the tunnel entrances into the underground complex had been sealed off with dirt prior to the U.S. airstrikes,” said Stephen Wood, senior director at Maxar. “We believe that some of the trucks seen on 19 June were carrying dirt to be used as part of that operation.”
Some experts say those trucks could also have been used to move out Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile.
Skepticism from Democrats
Democrats have previously said Trump’s claims that the weekend strikes eliminated or seriously set back Iran’s nuclear program were not yet backed by evidence.
“There’s zero evidence that I’ve seen that the nuclear program was completely and totally obliterated,” U.S. House of Representatives Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said on Monday.
Classified briefings on the matter for members of Congress were cancelled Tuesday.
William Hague, a former U.K. foreign secretary, said regardless of how much damage was done by the U.S. strikes, it will still be an ongoing challenge to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.
“In the long run, it’s going to be very hard to stop nuclear weapons proliferating by using force,” Hague told Times Radio. “That is going to need agreements.
“And a humiliated and defeated power in history normally finds a way of coming back again — in this case, with a nuclear weapon — in the future.”
