President Donald Trump is insisting that his strikes on Iran last week left the country’s nuclear program “obliterated like nobody’s ever seen before,” even as the United Nations nuclear watchdog says Tehran could resume uranium enrichment “in a matter of months.”
Trump told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo he doesn’t think the satellite images of trucks at two of the nuclear sites later hit by American pilots mean the country smuggled out much of its enriched uranium.
“No, I think,” he told Bartiromo in a pre-recorded interview that aired on “Sunday Morning Futures.” “First of all, it’s very hard to do, it’s very dangerous to do. It’s very heavy, very very heavy. It’s a very hard thing to do. Plus, we didn’t give them much notice because they didn’t know we were coming until just, you know, then. And nobody thought we’d go after that site because everybody said that site is impenetrable.”
The White House has continued to promote its attacks on Iran’s nuclear program as a complete victory. But the administration has not been able to provide convincing evidence, as experts caution that a definitive assessment on the strikes’ impact could take weeks or even longer.
In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency said the damage to Iranian facilities wrought by the attacks was “not total.” And without clarification about the whereabouts of the enriched uranium, “this will continue to be hanging, you know, over our heads as a potential problem,” he said.
But the president is projecting confidence.
“You know what they moved? Themselves,” Trump told Bartiromo. “They were all trying to live. They didn’t move anything. They didn’t think it was going to be actually doable, what we did.”
And Trump doesn’t think Iran has any incentive to rebuild its beleaguered nuclear program as the country contemplates its future following a damaging war with Israel and a tentative ceasefire.
“The last thing they want to do right now is think about nuclear,” he said. “They have to put themselves back into condition, in shape.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has long supported aggressive American action against Iran. But though he called the strikes on Iran “a tremendous military success,” he said Sunday it was “too early to tell” if Iran would ultimately abandon its ambitions to become a nuclear power.
“The question for the world: Does the regime still desire to make a nuclear weapon? The answer is yes. Do they still desire to destroy Israel and come after us? The answer is yes,” he said on ABC’s “This Week.”
