This week, John Ratcliffe, the director of the CIA, said in a statement that intelligence from a “historically reliable” source indicated that “several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years”.
However, there has been concern, prompted in part by satellite imagery showing trucks leaving Fordow before the attack, that Iran may have saved significant quantities of its enriched uranium.
This comes on top of earlier intelligence leaks to various US news outlets suggesting that the attacks had only set back the programme by a matter of months, prompting furious denials from the White House.
Trump has hit out at the “scum” who leaked intelligence suggesting his raids on Iran’s nuclear facilities were not as effective as he declared.
If confirmed, however, the report in the Israel Hayom newspaper indicated that the Americans were privately less confident about the success of their military intervention.
Before the war started on June 13, the International Atomic Energy Agency said it believed Iran had 408.6kg of uranium enriched to 60%.
Further enriching the nuclear material to weapons-grade, for which the threshold is 90%, is a relatively quick process. The quantity would provide enough fuel for roughly 10 nuclear warheads.
The nightmare for Israeli intelligence officials is that Iran spirited some of this material away to unknown labs where it could be fashioned into a “crude” device.
This is a relatively unsophisticated warhead which has not been miniaturised and mounted onto a ballistic missile.
Instead, it would have to be manually delivered to its target – smuggled into Tel Aviv in a truck, for example – before being detonated.
Although US-Iran talks had been ongoing for many weeks before Benjamin Netanyahu ordered Israel’s unilateral attack on Iran, progress was understood to have stalled because Iran refused to dismantle its enrichment process.
The report in Israel Hayom suggests Trump believes the destruction wrought by both Israel and America over the past week will force the Islamic Republic to soften its stance.
Some Israeli officials have a habit of briefing journalists anonymously with scenarios they would like to see happen, rather than ones that are necessarily taking place.
Speaking yesterday at the Nato summit in The Hague, Trump suggested that Israel had sent agents into the Fordow nuclear plant following the attack, to confirm its success.
“You know they have guys that go in there after the hit, and they said it was total obliteration,” he said.
Israeli officials told the Kan public broadcaster that they had no knowledge of such a mission.
Trump also said the US would strike Iran again if it restarted nuclear enrichment.
Asked how much he thought the Iranian nuclear programme had been set back, Trump said: “I think it’s basically decades, because I don’t think they’ll ever do it again”.
“I think they’ve had it. I mean, they just went through hell. They’ve had it.”
