In the days following the historic and unprecedented U.S. military strike in Iran, the top question that has been looming in the minds of experts and politicians has been whether the strike was necessary and if it actually achieved what the Trump administration is claiming — total destruction of the Iranian nuclear program.The administration was quick to claim victory, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters on Sunday — before the bombers even made it back to the U.S. — that “we devastated the Iranian nuclear program.”However, on Tuesday, multiple news outlets, led by CNN, reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency had produced an early assessment of the damage done by the military’s strike on three Iranian nuclear facilities and found that it was possible that the nuclear program had only been set back a few months and was not “completely and fully obliterated.”Read Next: Upcharging on Food, Selling Booze: The Army’s Plan to Privatize DiningSince then, the reality of what damage has actually been done to Iran and its nuclear program — and even whether that program was close to producing a bomb — has come under scrutiny and debate.Claims from President Donald Trump have contained contradictions in their details that have led to unanswered questions about accuracy, and officials have also been quick to dismiss even the need to assess the damage, arguing that the destruction was plainly overwhelming.
Meanwhile, experts have been split, and many have argued that it’s just too soon to declare victory or defeat.The Associated Press reported that the intelligence report found that, while the Sunday strikes at the Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear sites did significant damage, not only were the facilities not totally destroyed but at least some of Iran’s highly enriched uranium, a key product for creating a nuclear weapon, was moved and survived the strikes.The intel report also found that Iran’s centrifuges, which are required to make more enriched uranium, were largely intact.When asked about the report Wednesday, Trump didn’t deny its existence.”The document said it could be very severe damage,” Trump told reporters, before adding that “they said it could be limited or it could be very severe.”The news came as a sharp contrast to the rhetoric from the Trump administration, which has been trumpeting the strikes as an unqualified success that, they argued, dealt a final and historic blow to the nuclear program. On Wednesday, Trump even likened it to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that brought the war against Japan in World War II to a dramatic end.Trump has also been the source of most of the operational details for the fallout.On Tuesday, he revealed in a post on his own social media network that Iran fired 14 missiles — 13 of which were intercepted — at a U.S. base in Qatar. Meanwhile, an official at the Pentagon told reporters only that a missile attack had occurred.However, it’s not clear just how reliable those details are.Speaking to reporters in Brussels the next day, Trump told them that “all 14 [missiles], as you know, were shot down by our equipment.”Multiple officials at the Pentagon were unable to explain which statement was accurate.With conflicting details from the Trump administration, a spotlight has been placed on the U.S. intelligence community — which has long been seen as a relatively neutral arbiter of facts and information both for military planners and political leaders who need the military to help achieve their political goals — to sort truth from rhetoric.In March, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, told Congress that the belief of all the U.S. intelligence agencies is that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khomeini has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003.”Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said that, as late as last week, he was being briefed that “Iran was not close to building a deliverable nuclear weapon.”Meanwhile, days before the strike, Trump claimed Iran was “weeks away from having one.”Following the strike, Hegseth was asked about Gabbard’s March testimony and if there was new intelligence, but the defense secretary sidestepped the question.”I would just simply say that the president has made it very clear he’s looked at … all of the intelligence, all of the information, and come to the conclusion that the Iranian nuclear program is a threat,” Hegseth said.Most reports noted that the new assessment had “low confidence” in its conclusions — something several experts told Military.com is normal for such an early assessment.Joseph Rodgers, the deputy director and fellow for the Project on Nuclear Issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Military.com in an interview Wednesday that it will take time to do the detailed assessments necessary to gauge how much the military’s strikes damaged Iran’s nuclear facilities.”Did Operation Midnight Hammer succeed in destroying the core facilities that were targeted? I think that to do that, the sort of battle damage assessments that are being conducted, that’s going to take time,” Rodgers said. “Pointing to success immediately is very precarious.”Immediately after the bombings last Saturday, Rafael Grossi, head of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors Iran’s nuclear facilities, said that “no one, including the IAEA, is in a position to have fully assessed the underground damage at Fordo” — a key location built deep inside a mountain — but it is expected to be “very significant.”Grossi said Wednesday at a news conference in Austria that his top priority was to get his inspectors back into the three sites that were hit by the U.S. airstrikes and Tomahawk missiles launched from a nuclear submarine — Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan.David Albright, a former weapons inspector and now president of the Institute for Science and International Security, was more optimistic.”Iran has likely lost close to 20,000 centrifuges at Natanz and Fordo, creating a major bottleneck in any reconstitution effort,” he said in a social media post Tuesday.”Moreover, there has been considerable damage to Iran’s ability to build the nuclear weapon itself,” he added.Others were more skeptical.”Why am I so unimpressed by these strikes? Israel and the U.S. have failed to target significant elements of Iran’s nuclear materials and production infrastructure,” Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, said on social media Sunday.Lewis also noted that “Iran said it had a new enrichment facility” and that “Israel struck other facilities in Iran — but not the new one.”After the news of the intelligence report broke, many top officials in the Trump administration also took to criticizing the reporting by making the argument that the Iranian sites’ destruction was a foregone conclusion based just on the tonnage of explosives and the accuracy of the strike.”We dropped 14 30,000-pound bombs directly on their target. 420,000 pounds of bombs,” the Pentagon’s top spokesman, Sean Parnell, said in a social media post Tuesday.”It doesn’t take a genius to know that these nuclear facilities have been completely obliterated,” he added.It was a sentiment echoed by the White House and other officials in the administration.”Clearly, we dropped a lot of ordnance, but it’s pretty tough to tell how much damage was actually sort of inside of the facilities,” Rodgers said. “It’s obviously very politically risky for political leadership to come out and claim victory this early.”Notably, all bombs and munitions have a “probability of kill” — a statistical formula and analysis used by military planners to determine whether a weapon will be close enough to a target to effectively destroy it — that increases as the number of munitions goes up.However, on Wednesday, Hegseth also cited the destructive power as the reason why accurately assessing the damage done by the strike was very challenging.Hegseth told reporters that “all of the evidence of what was just bombed by 12 30,000-pound bombs is buried under a mountain … devastated and obliterated.””So if you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordo, you better get a big shovel and go really deep,” he added.Hegseth appeared to cite an incorrect number of bombs dropped by the bombers. On Sunday, Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman, told reporters that the military dropped 14 “30,000 pound GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators.”– Richard Sisk contributed to this story.Related: Early US Intelligence Report Suggests US Strikes Only Set Back Iran’s Nuclear Program by Months
Story Continues
