Donald Trump says America’s strikes on Iran blew up the regime’s nuclear program to “kingdom come” as he angrily pushed back against leaked U.S. intelligence.
One day after a preliminary Pentagon report suggested that the attacks did not obliterate Iran’s key nuclear facilities, Trump insisted they had been destroyed completely.
“We destroyed the nuclear,” he said. “Iran will not have nuclear. We blew it up. It’s blown up to kingdom come.”
The comments were made during a press conference at the NATO summit in the Netherlands, where Trump also lashed out at the media for calling into question the effectiveness of the attacks and compared the Iranian strikes to the World War 2 bombing of Hiroshima, saying both successfully ended wars.
This came in the wake of a preliminary analysis, produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s intelligence arm, which found that the weekend strikes only set Iran’s enrichment program back by six months but did not destroy its core components.
According to the report, which was initially leaked to CNN, the bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites sealed off the entrances to two of the facilities but did not collapse their underground buildings.
It also reportedly suggested that much of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was moved before the strikes. Some of that material has been moved to secret nuclear sites maintained by Iran.
Asked about the assessment, Trump told reporters it “wasn’t finished” and noted: “It’s not even a very exciting report at this point.”
“They didn’t see it. All they can do is take a guess. Now, if you take a look at the pictures - take a look and it’s all black,” he said. “It’s obliterated.”
His Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also chimed in, furiously telling reporters: “There’s a reason the president calls out fake news for what it is.”
Noting that the U.S. military flew 36 hours to take out three main Iranian targets-Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan-Hegseth added: “It’s beyond anything anyone else can fathom. And then the instinct of CNN, the instinct of the New York Times, is to try to find a way to spin it for their own political reasons to try to find a way to hurt President Trump.”
The debate over the precision of the strikes comes merely days after the U.S. controversially joined Israel to attack the core of Iranian nuclear infrastructure in what Trump touted as a perfectly executed mission.
Known as ‘Operation Midnight Hammer’, the strikes were carried out using deception and decoys to target the three Iranian facilities. It also included the use of 30,000-pound “bunker bombs,” marking America’s first ever operational use of this weapon.
On Tuuesday, Iran also declared that its nuclear program will “resume without interruption”, despite President Donald Trump insisting that the regime’s nuclear ambitions had been obliterated after being bombed by America.
“The nuclear program of Iran will resume without interruption, and we are ready to restart enrichment; our program will not stop,” stated the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, according to reports from state media.
Speaking at the summit on Wednesday, Trump announced that Iranian officials would talk next week. He also seemed to reject the argument that nuclear material was moved out of the target sites before the U.S. struck.
“We think we hit him so hard and so fast, they didn’t get to move," he said.
