The chief United Nations nuclear inspector has widened the divide with the Trump administration over how severely the United States set back Iran’s nuclear program, declaring that it could be enriching uranium in a “matter of months” even as President Trump repeated his claim that Tehran had lost interest in the effort.
“Frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there,” Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in an interview with CBS News that aired on Sunday.
He said that when the United States dropped 14 bunker-busting bombs on Iran’s two uranium enrichment centers, the damage was “severe” but not “total.” In previous interviews, he said he believed that all of the more than 18,000 centrifuges, buried in underground enrichment halls, had been destroyed or damaged and knocked out of operation.
But Mr. Grossi’s analysis — one that several European intelligence agencies share — is consistent with a preliminary assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency that was widely reported on last week. That report estimated that the strike set back the Iranian nuclear program by only a few months. The C.I.A. director said later in the week that the Iranian program had been severely damaged, and the U.S. intelligence agencies were continuing to assess the strike.
The Defense Intelligence Agency report appeared to focus on the enrichment process at the sites where the GBU-57 bunker-busters, among the most powerful in the U.S. arsenal, were used. Later analysis by outside groups suggested that the biggest loss for Iran might have been the destruction of facilities to turn that fuel into a weapon. In particular, damage to a laboratory under construction in the nuclear complex outside the ancient city of Isfahan, which is intended to convert enriched uranium into a metal, may prove a major bottleneck in Iran’s ability to convert highly enriched uranium into the metal that is needed to produce a weapon.
Rebuilding that capability, other experts have said, could take years. And much depends on whether Iran throws out I.A.E.A. inspectors — who remained in Tehran throughout the conflict with Israel earlier this month — or whether it decides to conduct its work in the open. Either way, it could be bombed again, as Mr. Trump has said in recent days he is quite willing to do.
But in an interview over the weekend, Mr. Trump repeated his insistence that Iran had given up its nuclear ambitions because the American attack had “obliterated” its facilities, a term he used just moments after the B-2 bombers had dropped their payload the prior weekend.
He has since threatened to sue CNN and The New York Times for citing the Defense Intelligence Agency report, and on Sunday, in a Fox News interview, he suggested that he would go further, using the legal system to force reporters to reveal their sources. (The Justice Department recently retracted rules that made the subpoena of reporters a move of last resort as it tried to track down sources of information.)
“You go up and tell the reporter, ‘National security — who gave it?’” Mr. Trump said. “You have to do that,” he concluded. “I suspect we’ll be doing things like that.”
Mr. Trump repeated statements he has made in recent weeks that he does not believe intelligence agency suspicions that the Iranians moved parts of their stockpile to new locations before the American attack in the early hours of June 22 in Iran.
He maintained that it was “very hard” and “very dangerous to do.” But the I.A.E.A. reported that the stockpiles of near-bomb-grade uranium it saw before the strike had been stored in containers that could fit in the back of a car, and Mr. Grossi noted that he had been told by Iranian officials that the canisters would be relocated to “protected” facilities.
Some American intelligence agencies believe it is very possible that vehicles seen outside Isfahan, where the majority of the stockpile was stored, may have been transferring it in the days before the strike.
Mr. Trump once again claimed that Iran had no interest in rebuilding its nuclear program, though he did not provide evidence for that assertion. “It was obliterated like nobody’s ever seen before, and that meant the end to their nuclear ambitions, at least for a period of time,” he told Fox News.
“The last thing they’re going to be doing right now, for a period of time, at least, is nuclear,” he insisted. “They’ve had it. They’ve been trying it for 25 years. The last thing they’re going to do is nuclear. We had to hit them, though. They were close to getting a nuclear bomb.” (Before the attack, U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Iran had not decided whether to make a bomb but was just a few steps away from being able to do so.)
Mr. Trump has repeatedly expressed interest in picking up negotiations with Iran, and offered to lift the huge array of sanctions on the country if it gave up all future enrichment and met other terms demanded by the United States. Those terms also include opening the country to full nuclear inspections.
“If they can be peaceful, and if they can show us they’re not going to do any more harm, I would take the sanctions off and the sanctions would make a big difference,” he said.
Mr. Trump has wavered repeatedly in recent days on whether he is truly interested in continuing nuclear negotiations with Iran, though the attack he ordered has changed the underlying dynamic and left Iran with far fewer bargaining chips. Its primary leverage right now is the continuing mystery over whether it has access to its uranium enriched to 60 percent — just short of the 90 percent usually used to make a weapon — and it seems unlikely to reveal anything about the whereabouts or condition of that stockpile.
But Mr. Trump’s statements about sanctions may be an indication that, for all his talk about military “obliteration,” he recognizes that keeping Iran from resuming its program depends on a diplomatic agreement and aggressive inspections.
On Sunday, Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who helped initiate negotiations with Iran that led to the 2015 nuclear accord, said that the need for a new deal after the attack was critical.
“We still need to get the full battle-damage assessment of what happened, and we need it to be unfiltered from political interference,” he said at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “We just need the straight dope from the American intelligence community and, frankly, from the Israeli intelligence community. But based on what I have seen so far, it is probable that Iran still retains on its territory some stockpiles of enriched uranium, still retains centrifuges and the capability to build more of them.”
“So if they woke up tomorrow and said, ‘We are going for it,’” Mr. Sullivan said, “it’s not implausible to me that a crash military program could be conducted in as little as a year. I’ve heard from some Israelis who say two to three years.”
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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