‘If the Iranians chose to rebuild, they would have to rebuild all three facilities,’ the director of national intelligence said.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said on Wednesday that new intelligence has shown that U.S. strikes on Iran set back the country’s capacity to produce nuclear weapons, disputing a report that it would only give the regime a few months’ delay.
“New intelligence confirms what @POTUS has stated numerous times: Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed. 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,” Gabbard wrote in a post on X on Wednesday.
Multiple media outlets, citing anonymous sources, reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) found that strikes on three Iranian facilities over the past weekend were not as significant as what has been publicly claimed. Those reports also claimed that Iran moved much of its uranium supply before the airstrikes.
Echoing Gabbard’s statement Wednesday, CIA Director John Ratlciffe wrote on X that “a body of credible evidence indicates” that the Iranian nuclear program was “severely damaged” by the U.S. strikes several days ago, also disputing the reporting Tuesday.
Gabbard, Ratcliffe, and President Donald Trump denied those media outlets’ claims, describing the DNI report as preliminary.
“The propaganda media has deployed their usual tactic: selectively release portions of illegally leaked classified intelligence assessments (intentionally leaving out the fact that the assessment was written with “low confidence”) to try to undermine President Trump’s decisive leadership and the brave servicemen and women who flawlessly executed a truly historic mission to keep the American people safe and secure,” Gabbard said in her statement on Wednesday.
Over the weekend, the United States launched several airstrikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities just over a week after Iran and Israel launched attacks each other on a daily basis, prompting fears of a wider, prolonged conflict.
Gabbard’s comment comes just hours after Trump read aloud a statement by Israeli officials that said the Iranian facilities, including the Fordow site that’s partially buried under a mountain, were totally destroyed by U.S. B-2 bombers.
“The devastating U.S. strike on Fordow destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility totally inoperable,” Trump said at a NATO conference in the Netherlands, reading the statement from the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission.
The Israeli agency assesses “that the American strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities have set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons for many years to come,” he said.
Trump said the strikes were responsible for ending the 12-day war between Israel and Iran and compared them to the United States’ use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, which brought an end to World War II in 1945.
The president has said that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, although the country’s regime has long said that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.
Earlier this week, Trump announced that Israel and Iran would participate in a cease-fire agreement in a bid to end the conflict in which the two countries were launching missiles at one another. Israel first struck Iran on June 13 and said it eliminated a number of the regime’s top generals and commanders.
Before, Trump floated the idea that Iran could undergo “regime change” if the country doesn’t move to negotiate over its nuclear program. But on Tuesday, he told reporters that he doesn’t want a change in the government, which has ruled Iran as an autocratic theocracy since 1979 following a revolution that led to a deadly hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran that lasted more than a year.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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