The U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities set back the Islamic Republic’s program "significantly," the head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog organization said Tuesday.
"I think the Iranian nuclear program has been set back significantly, significantly," International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general Rafael Grossi said in a Fox News interview. He noted that "it is clear that there is one Iran—before June 13, nuclear Iran—and one now," describing the difference as "night and day."
Just before the Tuesday afternoon interview, the IAEA revealed that it detected "extensive damage at several nuclear sites in Iran, including its uranium conversion and enrichment facilities." That damage caused a radioactive release, according to the organization.
"Our assessment is that there has been some localized radioactive as well as chemical release inside the affected facilities that contained nuclear material—mainly uranium enriched to varying degrees—but there has been no report of increased off-site radiation levels," Grossi said in the IAEA statement. The organization observed "two impact holes from the U.S. strikes" at Iran’s Natanz enrichment site above "the underground halls that had been used for enrichment as well as for storage," according to the statement, in which Grossi also said he saw "extensive damage at several nuclear sites in Iran, including its uranium conversion and enrichment facilities."
David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security, meanwhile, released a post-attack battle damage assessment based on satellite imagery of the targeted Iranian facilities as well as reporting from the IAEA and Israel Defense Forces (IDF). He determined that the U.S. and Israeli strikes "effectively destroyed Iran's centrifuge enrichment program."
"It will be a long time before Iran comes anywhere near the capability it had before the attack," Albright's report states.
The assessments from the IAEA and Albright align with proclamations from members of the Trump administration, including President Donald Trump himself, who have described the state of the Iranian nuclear program as "devastated" and "obliterated" after the United States’ Saturday evening bombing run. But they contradict reporting from CNN that suggested the strikes did not destroy significant portions of Iran’s nuclear program and only set the Islamic Republic back in its quest to develop a bomb by a few months.
CNN cited "four people briefed on" a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment. One claimed that Iran’s centrifuges are still "intact" and that the U.S. strikes "set [Iran] back maybe a few months, tops," according to the network.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back on the report, calling the assessment "flat-out wrong" and arguing that the leak appeared to be "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."
CNN did not disclose in its report that the DIA assessment was low-confidence and based on satellite imagery.
The CNN reporters who broke the story have histories of sharing intelligence assessments from anonymous sources that quickly fell apart.
Senior reporter Katie Bo Lillis, one of the three authors credited with writing the Tuesday report casting doubt on the effectiveness of the U.S. attack, penned a 2022 piece headlined, "US concerned Kyiv could fall to Russia within days, sources familiar with intel say." Three months later, Kyiv remained in Ukrainian hands—as it does today—prompting the U.S. intelligence community to launch an investigation into what it got wrong. Bo Lillis and her colleague Natasha Bertrand, another author of Tuesday's report, covered that investigation.
Bertrand is best known for her coverage of a different issue: the Hunter Biden laptop. Weeks before the 2020 election, she penned the infamous Politico piece, "Hunter Biden story is Russia disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say." The contents of Biden's laptop leaked because the former crack addict abandoned the computer at a repair shop, not because of Russia. Bertrand joined CNN roughly six months later in April 2021.
A CNN spokeswoman said the network "stands by our thorough reporting on an early intelligence assessment of the recent strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, which has since been confirmed by other news organizations. The White House has acknowledged the existence of the assessment, and their statement is included in our story."
While the Islamic Republic is believed to still possess around 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium—enough to fuel around 10 nuclear warheads—analysts believe this material is likely buried beneath hundreds of feet of rubble at Fordow, one of the sites the United States targeted, and thus inaccessible to Tehran’s hardline regime. Even if Iran could access the materials and still had operational centrifuges, Israel severely degraded its technological know-how through targeted assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, said Jonathan Conricus, a former IDF spokesman and current senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
"They don't have the scientists, and they don't have the centrifuges, and they don't have the infrastructure," Conricus told the Washington Free Beacon. "Even if it hasn't been destroyed, it is out of reach, most likely buried under hundreds of feet of rock and concrete. At the end of the day, the Iranian ability to develop nuclear weapons sustained quite extremely heavy blows."
Fordow, the mountainside bunker buried beneath more than 300 feet of concrete, sustained "very severe damage" during both Israeli and American strikes, Conricus said, noting that it may now be completely "unusable." After the U.S. operation on Saturday, Israel conducted a second round of strikes that blocked off Fordow’s entrances and exits, making it even harder for Iran to access the facility.
American intelligence assessments indicate that the likelihood of Iran having moved uranium stockpiles away from Fordow is low given that the Islamic Republic believed the site could withstand both American and Israeli bombs, according to Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.).
"In fact, we actually believe they stored more of it in Fordow because they believe Fordow was impenetrable," Mullin said on Monday.
Andrea Stricker, a nonproliferation analyst with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told the Free Beacon that the U.S. strikes severely damaged Iran’s nuclear program and that the Israeli campaign that preceded them means the Islamic Republic will not be able to turn enriched uranium into nuclear weapons.
"My assessment is that these sites and materials are entombed for now—accessing them will require immense Iranian excavation efforts that Israel and the U.S. could stop via targeted strikes, such as the one Israel took against an Iranian recovery team heading to Fordow," she said. "If centrifuges managed to survive at Fordow, they are likely in bad shape from the shock waves. HEU canisters might survive at Fordow and in the Esfahan tunnels, but again, this can be dealt with."
Stricker continued, arguing that "the regime’s ability to weaponize any remaining nuclear material is severely degraded—if not eliminated—thanks to Israel’s actions prior to the U.S. strikes. This means Tehran may not be able to construct nuclear weapons in the short term even if it wanted to."
Iranian officials said on Tuesday that they are still assessing the damage and had already put plans in place "to prevent any hiatus in the process of production and services in the nuclear industry."
"Iran had made a series of arrangements in advance to restore the nuclear activities," said Mohammad Eslami, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization (AEOI). Tehran’s nuclear industry, an AEOI spokesman subsequently said, "is deeply embedded in Iran and it is impossible for the enemies to uproot this technology."
Elliott Abrams, who served as U.S. Special Representative for Iran in the first Trump administration, argued Israel would quickly detect any Iranian effort to rebuild its nuclear sites given its spy agency's infiltration of the Iranian regime.
"If the centrifuges have been destroyed, there isn’t much I think that they can do with the enriched uranium they have," Abrams told the Free Beacon. "They cannot enrich it to bomb grade, 90 percent. Of course over the years they can try to rebuild, but they are penetrated by Israel and we will know much of what they are doing. And now they know for sure that if they try it again, they’ll be hit again."