On Wednesday afternoon, top intelligence officials in the Trump administration supported the president’s claim that U.S. strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend “totally obliterated” their targets. They join a growing chorus of executive-branch appointees who refute Tuesday’s leaked initial assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency, which said that the strikes set Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon back by only a few months.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard posted on X, “New intelligence confirms what [President Trump] has stated numerous times: Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed.” She added, “If the Iranians chose to rebuild, they would have to rebuild all three facilities (Natanz, Fordow, Esfahan) entirely, which would likely take years to do.” As DNI, Gabbard oversees the Defense Intelligence Agency, one of the agencies from which the leaked assessment of lighter damage reportedly originated.
Hours later, CIA Director John Ratcliffe posted an image of a CIA press release that similarly cited intelligence indicating that “Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged by the recent, targeted strikes” by U.S. airmen. Echoing Gabbard’s language of “new intelligence,” the press release referred to a “historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.”
These statements from U.S. intelligence community leaders add to multiple reports about the extent to which Iranian nuclear facilities were damaged by the strikes. On Wednesday, the spokesman of Iran’s Foreign Ministry, Esmail Baghaei, described his country’s nuclear facilities as “badly damaged.”
Also on Wednesday, Israeli intelligence services reported that Iran’s nuclear facilities had suffered “very significant” damage. Although “a professional battle damage assessment takes time,” Israel’s intelligence apparatus has “no indications the bunker-buster bombs didn’t work,” an official stressed. “Nobody here is disappointed.”
For his part, President Trump offered conflicting messages on the severity of the strikes at a NATO summit in the Netherlands, telling reporters that “the intelligence was . . . very inconclusive.” He went on, “The intelligence says, ‘We don’t know, it could have been very severe.’ That’s what the intelligence says. So I guess that’s correct, but I think we can take the ‘we don’t know.’ It was very severe. It was obliteration.”
In a later exchange, Trump compared the impact of the strikes he ordered on Iran’s nuclear program to the United States using nuclear weapons against Japanese cities to end World War II. “When you look at Hiroshima, if you look at Nagasaki, that ended a war, too,” Trump said. “This ended a war in a different way.”
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has attempted to discredit the findings of the leaked preliminary report minimizing the impact of the strikes. Also at the NATO summit, he argued that U.S. strikes devastated Iran’s nuclear program by destroying a “conversion facility” necessary to convert nuclear fuel into a form that can be weaponized. Rubio told reporters, “Here’s a fact: The conversion facility . . . you can’t do a nuclear weapon without a conversion facility, we can’t even find where it is, where it used to be on a map. You can’t even find where it used to be.”