US media reports say leaked intelligence has cast doubt on US President Donald Trump’s assertion that Iran’s nuclear facilities have been “obliterated”.
A preliminary assessment reportedly found the weekend strikes only set back the country’s nuclear program by a few months.
Details of the report, by the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, were provided to CNN and The New York Times. The White House criticised the assessment as “flat-out wrong” and said it had been leaked by a “low-level loser”.
According to multiple unnamed sources cited by the outlets, the assessment also found:
- The bombings sealed off the entrances to two of the three targeted facilities but did not collapse their underground buildings
- Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed. Some of it may have been moved to secret nuclear sites
- The strikes were estimated to have delayed the nuclear program by less than six months
The Defense Intelligence Agency assessment was preliminary and a clear picture was yet to form, according to the reports.
Mr Trump rejected the reports and said both CNN and The New York Times were trying to “demean one of the most successful military strikes in history”.
“The nuclear sites in Iran are completely destroyed,” he wrote on Truth Social, hours after the reports emerged.
White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said the assessment was: “Flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community.
“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,” she said in a post on X.
“Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000-pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
UN envoy says strikes aimed to ‘degrade’ nuclear capacity
The US bombings, dubbed Operation Midnight Hammer, targeted Iran’s three main nuclear sites — Isfahan, Natanz and Fordow.
The latter, a heavily fortified uranium-enrichment facility built beneath a mountain, was targeted by 13,000kg “bunker-buster” bombs — the weapons considered most likely to reach it.
After the strikes, Mr Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the targets were “obliterated”. General Dan Caine, the US’s top-ranking military officer, said initial indications were “all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction”, but full assessments would take time.
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Mr Trump has been critical of media coverage questioning the effectiveness of the strikes.
“Those pilots hit their targets, those targets were obliterated and the pilots should be given credit,” he said earlier on Tuesday, local time.
“These cable networks are real losers.”
At a United Nations Security Council meeting on the same day, acting US envoy to the UN Dorothy Shea said the strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities “effectively fulfilled our narrow objective: to degrade Iran’s capacity to produce a nuclear weapon”.
“These strikes — in accordance with the inherent right to collective self-defence, consistent with the UN Charter — aimed to mitigate the threat posed by Iran to Israel, the region and to, more broadly, international peace and security,” she added.
