Donald Trump and the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, have admitted to some doubt over the scale of the damage inflicted on Iran’s nuclear sites by the US bombing at the weekend, after a leaked Pentagon assessment said the Iranian programme had been set back by only a few months.
“The intelligence was very inconclusive,” Trump told journalists at a Nato summit in The Hague, introducing an element of uncertainty for the first time after several days of emphatic declarations that the destruction had been total.
“The intelligence says we don’t know. It could’ve been very severe. That’s what the intelligence suggests.”
The president then appeared to revert to his claim that “it was very severe. There was obliteration”. Later in the day, he claimed that was the conclusion from “collected intelligence”, and that the Iranian programme had been set back “decades”.
Trump also likened the US use of massive bunker-buster bombs on the Fordow and Natanz uranium enrichment sites to the impact of the US nuclear weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the second world war, using the comparison specifically in reference to their impact in ending a conflict.
Over the course of the day, Trump’s claims became more far-reaching, even rejecting reports from the nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that Iran’s 400kg stock of 60% enriched uranium could no longer be accounted for, and appeared to have been moved.
Earlier in the week, the vice president, JD Vance, had appeared to admit the US did not know where the highly enriched uranium was, and said it would be a subject of discussions with the Iranians.
Late on Wednesday, CIA Director John Ratcliffe said credible intelligence indicated that Iran’s nuclear programme had been severely damaged and would take years to be rebuilt.
“This includes new intelligence from 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,” Ratcliffe said in a statement.
Trump claimed there would be a US-Iran meeting next week to negotiate once more about Tehran’s nuclear programme. “We’re going to talk to them next week with Iran, we may sign an agreement, I don’t know,” he said, before adding: “I don’t care if I have an agreement or not.”
Trump was also markedly less confident on Wednesday about the ceasefire he had previous declared was “unlimited” and “going to go forever”, even suggesting that a return to conflict could be imminent.
“I dealt with both and they’re both tired, exhausted … and can it start again? I guess someday, it can. It could maybe start soon,” he said.
Accompanying Trump to the summit, Hegseth also seemed to downgrade his earlier declaration that Iran’s ability to make nuclear weapons in the future had been “obliterated”.
On Wednesday the defence secretary described the damage to Iran’s nuclear facilities by US and Israeli bombing as “moderate to severe”. He pledged there would be an FBI investigation of Pentagon leaks, but also claimed the leaked information was false.
Meanwhile the Israeli military said it was still trying to assess the damage inflicted by the bombing campaign, but a senior officer insisted: “We pushed them years backward.”
A statement issued on behalf of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), said the strikes had destroyed Fordow’s “critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable”. It added that the combined US and Israeli strikes “set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years”.
On Tuesday night CNN reported on a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) initial assessment, which tentatively concluded that the deeply buried Fordow site and the underground facilities at Natanz had not been destroyed, and key components of the nuclear programme, including centrifuges, were capable of being restarted within months.
The CNN account of the leak was independently confirmed as accurate by the Guardian and other outlets. The Washington Post noted that it was categorised as “low-confidence”, though a source told the Guardian that further analysis could find even less damage than the initial DIA estimate.
The DIA assessment also found that much of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, which would provide the fuel for making any future nuclear warhead, had been moved before the strikes and may have been moved to other secret nuclear sites maintained by Iran.
For several years, a new facility has been excavated under a mountain, just to the south of the original Natanz facility.
Providing an Israeli perspective on Wednesday, the IDF spokesperson Brig Gen Effie Defrin said the results of the air force’s bombing sorties had been “even better than we expected”.
“I can say right now that the estimate is that we struck a significant blow to [Iran’s] nuclear infrastructure,” Defrin said. “I can say that we pushed them years backward.”
CNN reported that Israeli intelligence estimates of the setback inflicted on Iran’s nuclear aspirations were two years.
The IAEA director general, Rafael Grossi, rejected what he described as an “hourglass approach” involving different assessments of how many months or years it would take Iran to rebuild, arguing it distracted from finding a long-term solution to an issue that had not been resolved.
“In any case, the technological knowledge is there and the industrial capacity is there. That, no one can deny. So we need to work together with them,” Grossi said, adding that his priority was the return of IAEA inspectors to the nuclear sites, the only way he said they could be properly assessed.
Nuclear experts described the development as a potential disaster for nonproliferation efforts, and warned of the dangers of Iran deciding to eject the remaining IAEA inspectors in the country and leave the 1968 nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT).
The treaty obliges Iran and other non-nuclear weapon countries to refrain from any efforts to make a bomb, and to undergo monitoring and verification.
Iran’s parliament is preparing a bill clearing the way for a departure from the NPT.
