Pentagon Now Says Strikes Set Iran's Program Back 1-2 Years

Top U.S. government officials have consistently said that last month’s air and missile strikes “obliterated” three facilities involved with Iran’s nuclear program, but on Wednesday, a Pentagon official offered a more specific assessment of the damage caused by the operation.

Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell told reporters that intelligence reports indicate that the three sites struck as part of Operation Midnight Hammer appeared to “have degraded their program by one to two years – at least intel assessment inside the department assess that, and I think their intelligence shares that conclusion.”

When asked if the Pentagon had determined that Iran’s nuclear program had been delayed by one to two years, Parnell replied: “I think we’re thinking probably closer to two years, like degraded their program by two years.”

Parnell also echoed previous language used by President Donald Trump and other defense officials that described the strikes, which involved the combat debut of the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP, as having “completely obliterated” three key Iranian nuclear sites.

Parnell said that the strikes on Iranian nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan had weakened Iran’s “physical capability of constructing a bomb.”

“It’s not just enriched uranium or centrifuges or things like that,” Parnell said. “We destroyed the components that they would need to build a bomb. And so, when you take the constellation of different things into consideration, yeah, we believe that Iran’s nuclear capability has been severely degraded – perhaps even their ambition to build a bomb.”

On June 21, President Donald Trump posted on social media that Iran’s major nuclear enrichment facilities had been “completely and totally obliterated.”

Subsequently, CNN and other media outlets reported that a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment found that Operation Midnight Hammer may not have destroyed Iran’s nuclear program, which may have been set back by months.

But in a June 26 press conference with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth labeled that report as preliminary, and insisted again that “because of decisive military action, President Trump created the conditions to end the war decimating, choose your word, obliterating, destroying Iran’s nuclear capabilities.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt echoed that language in a statement to CNN the same day, calling Midnight Hammer “a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program. Everyone knows what happens when you drop fourteen 30,000-pound bombs perfectly on their targets: total obliteration.”

On Wednesday, Parnell added that intelligence assessments into the strikes remain ongoing.

“Based on the success of the U.S. and Israeli military strikes, 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,” Parnell said. “And that promise was: Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.”

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