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The bombing of three Iranian nuclear facilities on June 21 by American B-2 aircraft damaged the sites and set back Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, but didn’t completely destroy the sites or Iran’s nuclear capabilities, according to experts we spoke with and a classified U.S. intelligence report.
But in a televised address on the night of the U.S. attack, President Donald Trump said, “Our objective was the destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world’s number one state sponsor of terror. Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
The president claimed in a June 23 Truth Social post, “Monumental Damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran, as shown by satellite images. Obliteration is an accurate term!”
At a June 22 press conference at the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth echoed Trump’s assessment of the strike, saying, “Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been obliterated.”
Trump went further in a Truth Social post on June 24, claiming the U.S. attack ended Iran’s nuclear weapons capability: “It was my great honor to Destroy All Nuclear facilities & capability, and then, STOP THE WAR!”
But the key nuclear sites — Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan– were not “obliterated,” nor was damage done “to all Nuclear sites in Iran.” And Iran’s nuclear enrichment capability is still viable, experts say. (We don’t know if Iran was actively constructing or seeking to construct a nuclear weapon — the U.S. Intelligence Community in late March assessed that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” However, when presenting that assessment, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, also noted that “Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”)
A five-page, preliminary, classified report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, the intelligence arm of the Pentagon, said the U.S. bombing of Iran’s three sites sealed off entrances of two facilities but didn’t destroy their underground buildings and set back Iran’s nuclear program by just a few months, CNN and the New York Times reported on June 24.
People familiar with the report told CNN the facilities’ centrifuges, which enrich uranium, remained largely “intact.”
Also, in anticipation of the attack, Iran moved equipment and a large amount of enriched, nearly bomb-grade uranium to an unknown location, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency and Israeli officials, the Times reported.
Officials told the Times the classified report was an initial assessment and others will follow. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the preliminary report was “flat-out wrong.”
Some leaders in Trump’s administration took a more cautious approach in describing the results of the U.S. attack on the day after. Asked by NBC News’ Kristen Welker on June 22 if he was confident Iran’s nuclear enrichment sites were destroyed, Vice President JD Vance said, “I’m not going to get into sensitive intelligence about what we’ve seen on the ground there in Iran. But we’ve seen a lot, and I feel very confident that we’ve substantially delayed their development of a nuclear weapon.”
At the June 22 Pentagon press conference, asked by a reporter about Iran’s nuclear capability after the U.S. strike, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “it would be way too early for me to comment on what may or may not still be there.”
Iran’s Nuclear Enrichment Capability
“The early indications confirm that even U.S. heavy bombing” of Fordo and the other key sites has “only ‘severely damaged’ not ‘destroyed’ these facilities, let alone the Iranian nuclear program and the regime’s determination, for now, to keep it going,” Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan organization that provides analysis on arms control and national security issues, told us in an email.
“It is also now quite clear that the Iranians, in anticipation of the U.S. attack, removed” a stockpile of more than 400 kilograms of uranium “enriched to 60%,” as well as other equipment from at least one of the nuclear sites, Kimball said. “This is the material that could be further enriched to bomb grade (90%) and provide enough raw material for about 10 nuclear devices; which would according to U.S. intel before the strikes take another 1-2 years to fashion into warheads small and light enough to be delivered via a ballistic missile.”
No one, including the International Atomic Energy Agency, knows where that material is now, he said.
David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, told NPR, “I think you have to assume that significant amounts of this enriched uranium still exist, so this is not over by any means.”
Albright also said Iran may have thousands of other uranium-enriching centrifuges, and the uranium stockpiles at the sites targeted by the U.S. may have been moved to another facility where it could be enriched for a nuclear weapon in a short period of time.
“Iran also retains a centrifuge manufacturing capability that can help it reconstitute machines [to] enable further enrichment activities, and it likely has another site for enrichment that does not appear to have been affected so far by U.S. or Israeli bombardment,” Kimball said.
John Erath, senior policy director of the nonpartisan Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, told us that if the U.S.-brokered ceasefire between Iran and Israel is sustained, “it should be used as an opportunity for negotiation for a durable peace agreement.”
“And as part of that negotiation, that should be one of the things the international community is demanding to know — just how much of this stuff there is and where it is,” Erath said, referring to Iran’s enriched uranium.
Kimball also addressed next steps in monitoring Iran’s nuclear program. “It will take time, a return to real diplomacy, and the return of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to Iran, to fully assess the status of Iran’s nuclear activities and to try to account for its nuclear material, including the highly-enriched uranium it had already accumulated before the war and to re-establish verifiable limits on its nuclear weapons potential, which remains,” he said.
“The bottom line is that the combined Israeli and U.S. strikes have set Iran’s program back some months, but at the cost of obliterating trust between the key parties, strengthening Tehran’s resolve to reconstitute its sensitive nuclear activities, possibly prompting it to consider withdrawing from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and possibly proceeding to weaponization,” Kimball said.
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