Trump disputes Pentagon view, says Iran atomic sites 'destroyed'

U.S. President Donald Trump disputed an intelligence report that found the airstrikes he ordered on Iran had only a limited impact on its nuclear program, even though the assessment came from the Pentagon.

“The nuclear sites in Iran are completely destroyed,” Trump said on Truth Social. He said CNN and the New York Times, which first reported the intelligence findings on Tuesday, “have teamed up in an attempt to demean one of the most successful military strikes in history.”

Later, speaking to reporters at a NATO summit in The Hague on Wednesday, he said the report was “very inconclusive” but that he still believed the sites were demolished.

“The intelligence says we don’t know,” he said. “It could have been very severe. That’s what the intelligence says. So I guess that’s correct, but I think we can take that we don’t know. It was very severe. It was obliteration.”

He also suggested Israel would soon be able to give a firm assessment because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “going to have people involved in that whole situation.”

The assessment from the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency said the bombing on June 22 likely didn’t cripple the core components of Iran’s program below ground, including its centrifuges, according to people familiar with its contents. The findings are in line with open-source satellite imagery that shows new craters, possible collapsed tunnel entrances and holes on top of a mountain ridge but no conclusive evidence the attack breached the most heavily protected underground facilities.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has backed Trump’s viewpoint on the success of the strikes in Iran. He said the Pentagon’s report was “preliminary” and “low confidence,” adding that the leak would be investigated.

Trump had said the strikes — on atomic sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan — “totally obliterated” their targets, and dismissed reports casting doubt on the claim. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt posted on X Tuesday that the intelligence finding of limited impact was “flat-out wrong.”

Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy for the Middle East, appeared on Fox News Tuesday night and described the reports as “completely preposterous.”

The head of Israel’s military, Eyal Zamir, late on Tuesday said the assaults on Iran had set back its nuclear and missile projects by years. Still, the Pentagon assessment was backed up to some extent by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Its chief, Rafael Grossi, told Fox News that while Iran’s atomic program “has been set back significantly,” it’s hard to specify whether that means months or years.

Trump brokered a ceasefire to end the 12-day conflict between Israel and Iran that appeared to be holding on Wednesday. The president had lashed out at both countries Tuesday, and particularly Israel, over what he said were early violations of the truce. Both nations have said they’ll honor the ceasefire provided their enemy does the same.

The de-escalation triggered a slump in oil prices — erasing almost all of its increase since the conflict broke out.

Still, the ceasefire remains fragile as the focus shifts back to nuclear diplomacy. A stated goal of the American and Israeli strikes was to destroy Iran’s ability to develop a nuclear weapon, adding urgency to assessments of how much damage was done.

Witkoff, who told Fox it would be almost impossible for Iran to resurrect its nuclear program, said he was already speaking with the country’s officials about restarting formal negotiations. The talks so far have been promising, he said.

The IAEA’s Grossi said inspections by the United Nations atomic watchdog should resume “as soon as possible” to determine what’s happened to Iran’s stocks of uranium enriched to 60% levels, not far short of the 90% required to build a bomb. The IAEA says it last verified those inventories a few days before Israel’s attacks on Iran started on June 13, and their whereabouts is now unknown.

The DIA’s report found considerable damage on the surface at the nuclear sites, with the U.S. strikes likely to have set Iran’s program back by several months to as much as a year, according to a person briefed on the report’s contents. The assessment has been shared with House and Senate leadership.

Before the strikes, Trump had said Iran was “weeks away” from having a nuclear bomb, though some experts and U.S. intelligence estimates said it could take months or years for the nation to develop a weapon.

The U.S. strikes involved dropping more than a dozen 30,000-pound so-called bunker-buster bombs on Iranian nuclear sites, their first use in combat, according to the Pentagon. Tomahawk missiles were also fired from a U.S. Ohio-class submarine in the Arabian Sea.

Before Israel’s attack on Iran, the U.S. had held five rounds of negotiations with the Islamic Republic, seeking a diplomatic solution to concerns over its nuclear program — effectively a replacement for the 2015 nuclear deal that Trump abandoned during his first term. An agreement hadn’t been reached, though a sixth round was scheduled before the Israeli missiles led to Iran canceling it.

Tehran has insisted on its rights under international law to enrich uranium for civilian purposes such as fueling nuclear power plants. In calls with regional counterparts reported by state media on Tuesday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian appeared to reiterate that stance. “The Islamic Republic of Iran is solely pursuing its legitimate rights and has no ambitions beyond that,” he told UAE officials.

In Iran, 606 people were killed by Israeli strikes, according to the government. Israeli emergency services said 28 people were killed by Iranian missiles, including four on Tuesday morning just as the truce was about to start.

Israeli authorities said Tuesday that wartime safety directives had been lifted. Netanyahu told the nation that immediate threats from Iran’s nuclear program and ballistic missiles had been eliminated — though his military chief, Zamir, cautioned that “the campaign against Iran is not over.”

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—With assistance from Akayla Gardner, Maeve Sheehey, Erik Wasson, Courtney McBride, Rosalind Mathieson and Stephanie Lai.