Trump said it is unlikely that such action against a reconstituted Iranian nuclear program will be necessary, as the U.S. strike ‘hit brutally and knocked it out’
President Donald Trump said Wednesday he is fully prepared to authorize further strikes on Iran’s nuclear program if the hardline regime attempts to reconstitute its heavily damaged atomic infrastructure, but signaled that outcome is unlikely after American airstrikes “hit brutally and it knocked it out” for years to come.
Asked if he is willing to authorize future military action, Trump responded, “Sure,” but indicated that there will likely be no need.
“It’s gone for years, years,” Trump said of the Fordow mountain bunker. “It’s very tough to rebuild because the whole thing is collapsed. Nobody can get in to see it because it’s collapsed. You can’t go in to see a room that has 10 million tons of rock in it, and the tunnels are totally collapsed.”
The president’s fresh assessment comes in the wake of a series of reports late Wednesday suggesting the strikes did not destroy significant portions of Iran’s nuclear program and only set the Islamic Republic’s weapons program back by a few months.
The reports, from CNN and the New York Times, centered on an early Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that found Iran’s centrifuges are still “intact” and that the U.S. strikes only “set [Iran] back maybe a few months, tops.” That analysis, however, was deemed low-confidence and relied on satellite imagery and signal intelligence—a fact CNN initially omitted from its widely viewed report.
Other analyses of satellite images determined the U.S. and Israeli strikes “effectively destroyed Iran’s centrifuge enrichment program,” according to a Tuesday evening report by the Institute for Science and International Security. “It will be a long time before Iran comes anywhere near the capability it had before the attack.”
Officials in Tehran, meanwhile, delivered false reports about the damage around Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan—Iran’s three main nuclear facilities—according to communications reportedly intercepted by Israel in recent days. The disinformation campaign could have influenced early American intelligence gathering, minimizing the damage caused by Saturday’s airstrikes.
Trump lashed out at CNN, the Times, and other outlets that published the top-secret DIA assessment, saying they seek to undermine the efficacy of America’s air operation.
“CNN is scum,” he said at a NATO gathering in The Hague. “MSDNC is scum. The New York Times is scum. They’re bad people. They’re sick, and what they’ve done is they’re trying to make this unbelievable victory into something less. Now, even they admit that it was hit very hard, okay, but it wasn’t hit, it was hit brutally and it knocked it out.”
Trump said the reporters who published the DIA report “demeaned” the military officials responsible for planning the strike.
“If you were in the Situation Room with me,” Trump added, “with the generals and all of the people that did such a good job, and then they get demeaned by these idiots at CNN who can’t get ratings, the place is dying.”
The president further noted that Israeli intelligence assessments, including those currently being compiled, comport with his own findings about the severe damage to Iran’s nuclear sites.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio backed Trump’s evaluation in separate remarks at the NATO meeting, saying, “There’s no way Iran comes to the table [for negotiations] if somehow nothing had happened.”
“This was a complete and total obliteration,” Rubio said. “They are way behind today compared to where they were just seven days ago because of what the president did.”
Israeli intelligence agencies similarly determined on Wednesday that Iran suffered “major, long-term damage” to its nuclear program and that any remaining enriched uranium is trapped deep underground.
Rafael Grossi, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s director general, also stated late Tuesday that Tehran’s “nuclear program has been set back significantly, significantly.”
“It is clear that there is one Iran—before June 13, nuclear Iran—and one now,” Grossi said, describing the difference as “night and day.”
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