A preliminary U.S. intelligence report, issued by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) on Monday, suggests that the recent American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities have only set back Tehran’s nuclear program by a few months, directly contradicting claims by President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the facilities were “completely and fully obliterated.”
According to two sources familiar with the early assessment, who spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to discuss the classified matter publicly, the strikes on the Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear sites did cause significant damage but did not totally destroy them. The report indicates that at least some of Iran’s highly enriched uranium was moved from multiple sites before the strikes and survived, and that Iran’s centrifuges remain largely intact. For instance, at the deeply buried Fordow enrichment plant, while the entrance collapsed and infrastructure was damaged, the underground enrichment infrastructure itself was not destroyed.
The White House has strongly pushed back against this assessment. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the report “flat-out wrong” and described its leaking as “a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program.” Leavitt asserted, “Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000 pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
Both the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) declined to comment on the DIA assessment. ODNI is responsible for coordinating the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies. The intelligence assessment was first reported by CNN on Tuesday.
This report challenges the public statements made by both Trump, who maintained that the sites were “totally destroyed” and Iran would “never rebuild,” and Netanyahu, who hailed the outcome as a “historic victory” that “brought to ruin Iran’s nuclear program.”
