Iran strikes set back nuke program by up to 2 years, US says

Ryan Chua, Bloomberg News on Jul 2, 2025

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U.S. airstrikes on Iran set back the country’s nuclear program by one to two years, a Pentagon spokesman said, adding to uncertainty around the status of the country’s facilities after President Donald Trump said they’d been obliterated.

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said allies share the U.S. sentiment about the degradation of Iran’s nuclear abilities “and the fact that we have degraded their program by one to two years — at least the intel assessments inside the department assess that.”

“And I think their intelligence shares that conclusion,” he said. He said the U.S. assessment remains that the facilities struck by the U.S. had been “completely obliterated.”

“We also believe that the degradation of the facilities at Fordo, Esfahan and Natanz degraded their physical capability of constructing a bomb,” he said.

Parnell’s comments echo those of President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly asserted that the U.S. bombing of key facilities “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program. His administration also has rejected a preliminary assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency that said the strikes may have set back the program by just months.

There’s still little information from the ground as Iran is said to have cut off communication with officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog. Iranian nuclear safety regulators have stopped taking calls from the IAEA after formally ending inspections last week, Bloomberg News reported.

The location of Iran’s 409-kilogram inventory of near-bomb-grade uranium also remains unknown.

Trump ordered the strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities in June, and then announced a ceasefire between Iran and Israel after 12 days of war. The truce has so far held, but Iran’s armed forces chief of staff expressed doubt that it would last.

Trump indicated that he might offer Iran a relief from economic sanctions “if they can be peaceful,” after earlier saying he’d keep them in place as he lashed out at Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei for claiming victory in the war with Israel.

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(With assistance from Courtney McBride.)

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