During a Sunday morning press conference, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that “many presidents have dreamed of delivering the final blow to Iran’s nuclear program, and none could until President Trump.”
The defense secretary then said to the world’s cameras: “We devastated the Iranian nuclear program.”
In Israel, though, there’s less certainty about whether Iran’s nuclear development has been smashed to pieces by U.S. strikes on three of Iran’s major nuclear facilities overnight, and whether the country’s nuclear program is permanently out of the game.
“Is it fully, fully annihilated? We don’t know yet,” a senior Israeli official told Newsweek. “Nobody knows yet,” added the source, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “It requires a lot of intelligence work.”
Israel and the U.S. both say they are still conducting assessments of the impact of American aircraft, massive “bunker-buster” bombs and submarine-launched cruise missiles on the central Iranian facilities of Isfahan, Natanz and Fordow.
Initial takes suggest “all three sites sustained extremely severe damage,” General Dan Caine, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Sunday. Trump late on Saturday described Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities as “completely and totally obliterated.”
Yet analysts say it is very hard to judge whether the Iranian nuclear program, shrouded in mystery, has centrifuges squirreled away, or where exactly it is keeping many kilograms of unaccounted-for, highly enriched uranium. There may even still be entire sites no one knows about, experts add, on top of the difficulties working out the extent of destruction to areas so deep underground.
Satellite imagery published on Sunday indicated several large craters at an ash-covered Fordow, damage to buildings at Isfahan and a 5.5-meter diameter crater directly over part of the underground facility at Natanz, according to imagery provider Maxar.
Caine, speaking to the media alongside Hegseth on Sunday, painted a picture of an intricate, highly classified American operation, rife with decoys and absolutely minimal communications while en route to Iran.
A U.S. submarine launched more than two dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles against the aboveground facilities at Isfahan around 5 p.m. ET on Saturday, just before U.S. aircraft entered Iranian airspace, he said.
Washington used deception tactics and a host of fourth- and fifth-generation aircraft traveling ahead of B-2 heavy bombers to sweep for Iranian fighter jets and air defenses, Caine added.
At 6:40 p.m. ET, the first B-2 dropped two “bunker buster” GBU-57/B bombs at Fordow, the top general said. The rest of the munitions were dropped in the following 25 minutes, and Iran did not fire at U.S. aircraft traveling in or out of Iran, Caine added.
The B-2s and their 30,000-pound GBU-57/B bombs were widely deemed the only aircraft-and-bomb combination to be able to take out a deeply buried site like Fordow, the underground complex built into a mountain roughly 60 miles south of Tehran.
Israel, while not pursuing Fordow, has for over a week carried out extensive airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear sites, including Isfahan and Natanz, and killed a litany of senior nuclear scientists and generals.
‘Ambitions Cannot Be Obliterated by Fire’
“Military attacks can degrade a program to varying degrees, but there is no military solution for a decisive and inclusive elimination of the program,” Darya Dolzikova, a senior research fellow for proliferation and nuclear policy with the influential British think tank, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said.
Attacks have certainly hit critical sites, Dolzikova told Newsweek. But even if the physical facilities sustain the maximum possible damage, “if Iran decides in the future that it wants to actually rebuild or even expand its program, the expertise remains for them to be able to do that.”
“Ambitions cannot be obliterated by fire,” Eran Lerman, a former Israeli deputy national security adviser who’s currently the vice president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, an Israeli think tank, said.
But Israeli intelligence has reached the core of Iran’s nuclear efforts, meaning it would be very difficult for Tehran to trust anyone it brings into the fold to rebuild, Lerman told Newsweek.
Iran insists its nuclear program is peaceful, but its officials have openly floated discussions on whether Tehran needs nuclear weapons. Experts say highly enriched uranium, far beyond that needed for non-weaponized nuclear development, has been found in Iran and it would not be hard for Tehran to make the leap toward a nuclear weapon.
Israel said as it launched its strikes on Iran earlier this month that Tehran “could take steps to produce a weapon in a very short time” if not stopped.
U.S. intelligence believes Iran hasn’t decided whether it take that step towards weaponization, The New York Times reported on Thursday, citing officials. However, Iran’s top leadership is likely to move towards producing a bomb if the U.S. attacked Fordow, senior intelligence officials told the newspaper at the time.
How Iran’s most senior players currently assess the playing field, after U.S. strikes on Fordow, is not clear.
Trump once again pushed for Iran to negotiate on a deal late Saturday, threatening Tehran with “far greater” attacks if it did not negotiate. The country’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, warned of “everlasting consequences” for what he termed “outrageous” U.S. attacks, and has said Tehran will not negotiate while under Israeli attack.
Iran’s nuclear program cannot be taken out without negotiations, William Alberque, a senior adjunct fellow with the Pacific Forum and a former director of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) Arms Control, Disarmament and WMD [Weapons of Mass Destruction] Non-Proliferation Center, said.
“They’ve developed the most advanced centrifuges,” he told Newsweek. “Those designs can’t be eliminated.”
For international watchers to be sure they have a grip on Iran’s nuclear development, Tehran would need to be under an enrichment ban and the United Nations’ (U.N.) nuclear watchdog would need access to undeclared Iranian nuclear sites, Alberque said.
Iranian state media reported key nuclear sites had been evacuated ahead of U.S. attacks, with enriched uranium moved “to a safe location.” Satellite imagery provided by Maxar showed “unusual truck and vehicular activity” close to the entrance of Fordow on Thursday and Friday.
Iran was producing considerable amounts of highly enriched uranium at Fordow, but it is not immediately apparent how much was still at the site in recent days, Alberque told Newsweek earlier on Sunday.
The U.N.’s’ nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said on Sunday it had not detected an increase in off-site radiation levels but called an “emergency meeting” for Monday.
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