Top officials at the Pentagon office that played a key role in designing the bombs used in the strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities more than two weeks ago cannot say whether the weapons were successful in reaching the deeply buried bunkers.
At a press briefing days after the strike, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that "for more than 15 years" a pair of officers at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency "lived and breathed this single target -- Fordo -- a critical element of Iran's covert nuclear weapons program" and hailed the agency as "the world's leading expert on deeply buried underground targets."
However, in a press briefing Thursday, a senior defense official at the agency told reporters that they didn't know whether the bombs they designed specifically for this strike reached the depths for which they were engineered. They also defined the effects of the strike in incredibly narrow terms that boiled down to the bombs falling where they were intended.
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The officials, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity, argued that the historic U.S. strikes on three key Iranian nuclear facilities[2] were successful and their 30,000-pound bombs, 14 of which were dropped on two sites, accomplished their goals.
Top political appointees in the Trump administration, along with President Donald Trump himself[3], have asserted that the strike left Iran's nuclear program "obliterated." However, since then, reporting has indicated that that may not have been the case.
Reports emerged days after the strike that initial assessments by the Defense Intelligence Agency found that the airstrikes on Iran had likely not eliminated its nuclear program and only set it back months.
Days later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spent a large portion of a press conference[4] berating the media over what he felt was bad coverage of the report and the strikes as a whole -- even as lawmakers, following a classified briefing, told reporters that it was too early to know the damage.
When a reporter pushed the DTRA officials Thursday on their claims of success, the senior defense official deferred to Caine's remarks and said that "we achieved the objective that we had set. ... They achieved the effects intended."
"That's the success I was claiming."
When asked whether those effects included the destruction of the facilities, the senior defense official said that the agency was still "awaiting full battle damage assessment."
Under further questioning, the senior official said that the achieved effects that they were referring to were simply that "we were able to strike the facilities as planned and strike where intended."
While such fine parsing of language would be typical for officials of any highly specialized and technical office, it comes at a time when both the White House and Pentagon leaders, eager to convince the American public of the resounding success of the Iranian strikes, have spoken in sweeping and dramatic terms.
Last Wednesday, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell told reporters[5] the bombing led to "the total obliteration of Iran's nuclear ambitions."
Yet later in the same briefing, Parnell also said that the nuclear program was degraded -- not obliterated -- "by one to two years I think. ... We're thinking probably closer to two years."
Furthermore, in the weeks after the strike, experts were quick to note that the type of argument the Pentagon was employing -- that the mission was successful because it matched the models and plans -- was flawed.
"A strike can go 'precisely as planned' and still fail, if the model of the facility is wrong," Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, said on social media two weeks ago[6].
Meanwhile, on Thursday, The New York Times, citing an Israeli official, reported[7] that at least some of Iran's stockpile of enriched uranium -- a key component of a nuclear weapon -- survived the U.S. and Israeli attacks last month.
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