Team Trump hits back as doubts linger over Iran's nuclear programme
President Trump's top general asserted the accuracy of the bombing raid on Iran as the administration fought back against reports that the US failed to destroy Tehran's nuclear programme.
Dan Caine, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, set out how B-2 stealth bombers destroyed concrete protective covers over two ventilation shafts at the Fordow enrichment facility before dropping five GBU-57 bunker-buster bombs down each one, causing underground explosions. Two more of the bombs were dropped on the Natanz nuclear site.
Seven B-2s were involved, with both male and female pilots.
Caine refused to be drawn into a row over the impact on Iran's nuclear programme. He left it to Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, to reinforce the president's assertion after the strikes on Saturday night that 'Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated'.
Hegseth, like Trump, portrayed any doubts about the impact of the mission, codenamed Operation Midnight Hammer, as 'undermining the success of incredible B-2 pilots'.
Caine and Hegseth gave a briefing at the Pentagon after the leak of an early Defence Intelligence Agency assessment that core parts of the nuclear programme escaped and it was likely to be set back by only months.
Several other intelligence assessments by different parts of the US intelligence community and Israel, as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency, described the damage to the bombed sites as severe.
John Ratcliffe, the director of the CIA, hinted that he had intelligence not available to the DIA which painted a more favourable picture, though he did not go into details.
He cited 'new intelligence from a historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years'. However, he did not go beyond describing the programme as 'severely damaged'.
• Does Iran have nuclear weapons — and did US strikes destroy them?
Rafael Grossi, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog, described the damage as 'very considerable'. He added: 'I think 'annihilated' is too much but it suffered enormous damage.'
He said that the extent of the damage to Natanz and Fordow meant the centrifuges used to enrich uranium could no longer be working.
Grossi said he had been in touch with Abbas Araghchi, the Iranian foreign minister, about resuming inspections, but had yet to receive a reply. The Iranian parliament voted on Thursday to end collaboration with the agency, though that vote has still to be ratified by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Trump said satellite pictures of lorries queuing at nuclear sites before the US airstrikes did not mean that Iran's stockpile of more than 400kg of enriched uranium had been removed. Hegseth acknowledged some doubt, saying that the Pentagon was 'looking at all aspects of intelligence and making sure we have a sense of what was where'.
Preliminary intelligence assessments for European governments suggested that Iran's stockpile of highly enriched uranium remained 'largely intact'.
Karoline Leavitt, Trump's press secretary, sought to redefine 'obliterated' in her White House briefing, suggesting this should be taken to mean ending Iran's war with Israel. 'So why did the president immediately turn to 'obliterating' after the Iranian nuclear strike?' she said. 'Securing peace. Within 48 hours of the devastating strike, President Trump and his team brokered a historic ceasefire between Israel and Iran and officially ended the 12-day war.'
Khamenei gave a different account of the air raids and the retaliatory action Iran took, firing missiles at Al Udeid military base in Qatar.
Iran's foreign ministry had said on Wednesday the nuclear programme had been 'badly damaged' but Khamenei said: 'The US attacked our nuclear facilities, but couldn't achieve anything significant.'
Speaking from a bunker for the first time since the US strikes, the Ayatollah claimed victory and repeated his defiant pledge to Trump that he would 'never surrender'. He said: 'The Islamic Republic slapped America in the face.'
His claims on the military exchanges contradict the harsh statistics. Iranian missiles killed 29 people in Israel, but the country's Iron Dome and other missile defence systems prevented more casualties. Iran's much sparser defence systems had been largely wiped out by Israeli raids last year, and more than 600 Iranian civilians were killed.
• 'If the bombing failed, people died for nothing'
Israel also killed a significant number of Iran's military chiefs and about a dozen of its leading nuclear scientists. More shocking, perhaps, was the intelligence which allowed Israel to pinpoint them with uncanny accuracy.
Scientists say the question of how long it would take for Iran to rebuild its nuclear programme depends on the survival of its stocks of 60 per cent enriched uranium which, with the right equipment, would take only a few weeks to enrich further to the 90 per cent needed for a practical warhead.
It is known to have other sites, including a third underground facility under 'Pickaxe Mountain' near Natanz, which were not struck at the weekend.
If the regime attempted to put new centrifuges there, it would raise the question of whether US and Israel were prepared to return to military operations.
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This week's newsletter, for example, began with a newly published study of tree rings that suggested 'irreversible large-scale forest loss' in the Amazon; featured a study saying climate change could reduce crop yields across the US and Europe 40% by 2100, which one scientist likened to 'everyone on the planet giving up breakfast'; touched on counterintuitive research showing that some glass bottles contain up to 50 times more microplastics than plastic bottles or metal cans; and reported that this is 'the sixth consecutive year that global peacefulness has deteriorated' per the Global Peace Index. These were just a few of around a hundred links. 'Collapse is hard to deny when it's all laid out for you every week,' says the author. Readers are now able to spend just five or 10 minutes reading one email 'and be kept abreast on all the latest doom'. I ask what differentiates just bad news from a news story that is actually about collapse. 'I have found that it helps to imagine likely realities for humanity, position your perspective in the future, and then look backwards for the telltale signs and milestones of future collapse,' the author says. 'What factors and events will seem obvious to someone living 50 or 100 years from now? We can look back at the 1930s today and the road to WWII seems much clearer. Scientists are publishing under-appreciated studies every day, and their relevance is fairly obvious. Yet our attention lies elsewhere entirely.' A weekly roundup does seem like a useful alternative to completely ignoring society's downfall. But if things are as bad as r/collapse believes them to be, does it do us any good to inundate ourselves with news of the end of everything? Aren't we just increasing our personal suffering without making anything better? 'Yes, I sometimes wonder about the overall mental impact of Last Week in Collapse,' says its author. 'I know some people find it to be valuable, informative and even soothing. Others can't bring themselves to read it. It's not for everyone, and that's fine. To paraphrase Trotsky: you may not be interested in collapse, but collapse is interested in you.' To that end, the subreddit provides online mental health resources as well as a separate community, r/CollapseSupport, where people talk about their struggles. 'Can't stop thinking about the children', 'feeling completely hopeless' and 'scared to death for everyone' are three recent post titles. Most of the moderators say that the thing they've found most helpful in dealing with the onslaught of information is moderating itself, and connecting with people who have similar concerns across the world: debating but also sharing cat photos and having meaningful discussion about how to lead a meaningful life in the end times. But they're aware they're not always the most fun people at a party. 'I don't want to be right about this sort of situation,' said one of the moderators, an electrical engineer from the midwest. 'But if you're open-minded and you're considerate of sources, and you're approaching it from a very methodical fashion, there is much cause for concern. Working through that grief was trying. I think there's a lot of people that come to this community that maybe had my same perspective, and if I can at least help a few of those folks work through that, or come to their own peace, that adds some small iota of value to the internet space at large.' And that would be a vaguely uplifting note to end this article on, but as I'm hearing, that's the coward's way out. The truth is not all the people behind r/collapse feel like they're necessarily helping. As the author of Last Week in Collapse put it to me, there's probably no way out of the collapse: 'I do not believe we will ultimately innovate or vote ourselves out of our situation. I predict humanity is in for a polluted future of climate emergencies, famines, wars and scarcity before the end of this century. And heatwaves, civil conflicts, breakdown of ocean currents, disease, poverty, overpopulation, drought and more. So I feel a certain sense of duty to inform those who are interested, but it's probably healthier to 'chop wood, carry water' than to spend too much time following the world's problems. Most people can't really stop the machine anyway.'
