The Pentagon believes that American and Israeli strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities have delayed Tehran’s nuclear program by as much as two years.

Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon on July 2, Department of Defense spokesperson Sean Parnell said that U.S. and Israeli strikes had severely degraded Iran’s capability to pursue a nuclear weapon if it chose to do so.

It was likely, he said, that Iran’s capability to develop a nuclear weapon had been degraded “by one to two years.”

“I think we’re thinking probably closer to two years,” Parnell said.

He also said that the U.S. operation Midnight Hammer, which saw American forces drop bunker buster bombs on Iran’s fortified nuclear enrichment site at Fordow, likely destroyed key underground enrichment facilities there.

“Certainly all of the intelligence that we’ve seen suggests … those facilities were completely obliterated,” Parnell said.

“Iran is much further away today from a nuclear weapon than they were before the president took bold action to fulfill his promise to the American people,” he said.

“And that promise was ‘Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.’”

Parnell did not give a definitive answer when asked whether the Pentagon had assessed whether Tehran was determined to build a nuclear weapon.

A threat assessment published in March by the intelligence community said that leadership in Tehran was not committed to building such a weapon.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified at the time that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and [Iranian Leader Ali] Khamanei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.” President Donald Trump on June 20 said the intelligence assessment was “wrong.”

Gabbard also said, “America has intelligence that Iran is at the point that it can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks to months, if they decide to finalize the assembly.”

The future of Iran’s nuclear program, and whether the Islamist leadership in Tehran will now pursue nuclear weapons, remain open questions.

Following Midnight Hammer and Israel’s much wider operation Rising Lion, Iranian state media said that the regime there had successfully moved some highly enriched uranium out of harm’s way, though those claims could not be independently verified.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on June 26 that he wasn’t aware of intelligence showing Iran had moved its uranium ahead of U.S. airstrikes.
Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said during a June 28 interview with CBS that Tehran maintained some of its uranium but that its enrichment capabilities had been significantly damaged.

Other analysts believe it is likely that Iran maintains a significant amount of enriched uranium, though it now lacks the capacity to enrich more and does not possess the technology to miniaturize that uranium into a nuclear warhead.

Brent Sadler, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, told The Epoch Times shortly after the American strikes in Iran that there was “a high probability that some amount of weapons-grade uranium is still in Iran and can be weaponized.”

“If this is the case, the Iranian regime could potentially assemble less than 8 weapons with no ability of producing more such weapons until reconstituting its nuclear weapons enterprise,” Sadler said in an email.

Sadler also said that he disagreed with earlier assessments that Israel or the United States had completed the objective of wholly destroying Iran’s nuclear arsenal.

“It is clear the Iranian weapons program has been paused at worst and set back years at best,” Sadler said.

A government spokesperson in Iran acknowledged this week that the regime is attempting to regain access to the underground facilities at Fordow in a bid to assess the damage there and possibly salvage some of its equipment.

Satellite imagery on June 1 revealed trucks and a crane conducting excavation work at one of the collapsed entrances to the facility.

Jackson Richman contributed to this report.