On Wednesday, President Trump disclosed that Israel dispatched operatives to Iran’s targeted nuclear sites to verify their complete destruction. He emphasized that his unexpected offensive was executed swiftly enough to prevent Tehran from extracting its uranium.
Trump was resolute in his assertion that the strikes decimated Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and delayed its program by decades, despite a leaked initial intelligence report suggesting that Tehran might be able to restore it within months.
“I understand that Israel is conducting a report on the situation now, and I was informed that they described it as total obliteration,” Trump stated to reporters at the NATO summit in the Netherlands.
“You know they have guys that go in there after the hit, and they said it was total obliteration,” he continued, adding “I believe it was total obliteration.”
He insisted Iran wouldn’t have been able to remove the uranium being enriched at the sites before he gave the order to drop the barrage of massive bunker-buster bombs on the three sites.
“They didn’t have a chance to get anything out because we acted fast. If it would have taken two weeks, maybe. But it’s very hard to remove that kind of material, very hard and very dangerous for them to remove it,” Trump said.
“Plus they knew we were coming, and if they know we’re coming, they’re not going to be down there.”
He argued, too, that the strikes had set Iran’s nuclear ambitions back “basically decades.”
It comes after the White House trashed a classified Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) bomb damage assessment leaked to CNN that claimed Iran could bring back its nuclear program within months.
“This alleged ‘assessment’ is flat-out wrong and was classified as ‘top secret’ but was still leaked to CNN by an anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote on X.
“The leaking of this alleged assessment is 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,” she added.
“Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000-pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”
