On June 22, 2025, President Donald Trump bombed three of Iran’s nuclear sites, announcing the attack on X. “A full payload of bombs was dropped on the primary site, Fordow,” said Trump. Trump followed up this post by stating that “The damage to the Nuclear sites in Iran is said to be ‘monumental.’ The hits were hard and accurate.” However, according to recent reports, the attack wasn’t as successful as Trump had thought. An assessment was performed by intelligence of the damage done on Iranian nuclear sites and the results they were reporting were underwhelming.
According to CNN, “The analysis of the damage to the sites and the impact of the strikes on Iran’s nuclear ambitions is ongoing and could change as more intelligence becomes available. But the early findings are at odds with President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the strikes ‘completely and totally obliterated’ Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities” and that “Two of the people familiar with the assessment said Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed. One of the people said the centrifuges are largely ‘intact.’ Another source said that the intelligence assessed enriched uranium was moved out of the sites prior to the US strikes. ‘So the (DIA) assessment is that the US set them back maybe a few months, tops,’ this person added.”
During a NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, Trump has expressed his disagreements with the assessment and doubled down, stating that “It’s been obliterated, totally obliterated.” The United States Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, was also in disagreement. “The assessment was a top-secret report; it was preliminary; it was low confidence,” said Hegseth. Trump added that he felt due to the nature of the assessment, he wasn’t confident in its accuracy, saying that “They did a report, but it was like, if you look at the dates, it’s just a few days after, so they didn’t see.”
