what’s at stake
President Donald Trump’s declaration that US strikes “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear facilities cuts against an internal, preliminary intelligence assessment that the operation merely set back Tehran’s nuclear program by months.
In fact, it’s too early to draw definitive conclusions in either direction. The intelligence community’s investigation of the destruction — called a battle damage assessment — is still ongoing and will take more time to complete.
But a final assessment will likely still come with some caveats or doubts, which means the debate over the damage may never be fully settled.
In this article:
who’s making the case
Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., a former CIA analyst, said the US may never really know for certain:
“When you’re in this business, you’re never going to get 100% on anything. It’s about managing risk, right? This isn’t the first time we’ve tried to assess something inside an adversarial nation. So, you do your best assessment, but that’s usually why you are pretty painstaking about it. You don’t do it and announce it the next day. You do the real work.”
Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., a member of the Intelligence Committee, expressed confidence the US would be able to come to a conclusion about the damage — eventually:
“We’ll have a pretty good understanding of it exactly — what it was and the damage that was done. But it takes time. We can do the preliminary damage assessment — the battle damage assessment — but it does take time to … find out because you really do want verification of just exactly how much damage is done.”
Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, argued the important question is not whether the strikes destroyed the facilities, but what was in them when the US bombs were dropped:
“No one’s focusing on the question of what was actually in the facilities when those big bombs dropped and ‘obliterated’ those facilities. Now, you can look at the Maxar satellite images of trucks backed up against the Fordo portals. You can consider the fact that the Iranians had more than a few days warning about what was coming. And ask yourself, ‘What do you think was in there?’ So people are using a lot of language. The real question, the really critical question is, with what they have — and we don’t really know — if they decide to do a breakout, what’s the timeframe?
“That’s the really critical question. If you vaporized all the uranium — which they didn’t — if you vaporized all of the centrifuges and other equipment, the answer would probably be years. If you didn’t touch anything, the answer would almost certainly be months. So anyway, the question matters, because the White House is like, ‘Yeah, there was some stuff that was obliterated.’”
Notable
- One question that has notably divided the US intelligence community: Whether the COVID-19 pandemic originated from a lab leak.
- Iran’s Foreign Ministry claimed that its nuclear facilities were “badly damaged” by the strikes, Bloomberg reported.
- The head of the UN’s nuclear watchdog said Iran could begin enriching uranium again in months, CNN reported.