President Donald Trump said Thursday that Iran was not able to evacuate nuclear materials from a deep underground site bombed by long-range US planes last week.
"Nothing was taken out of facility. Would take too long, too dangerous, and very heavy and hard to move!" Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform, referring to the secretive Fordo site hit by B-2 bombers.
Trump said that satellite photos of a large number of trucks outside the site ahead of the US raid only showed crews attempting to protect Fordo with concrete "to cover up the top of the shafts."
The president's comments come after the press conference held by the U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to present a new assessment of last weekend’s strikes targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities. “It’s one of the greatest, most professional, and most “confirming” News Conferences I have ever seen! The Fake News should fire everyone involved in this Witch Hunt, and apologize to our great warriors, and everyone else!” said the US president on Truth Social.
During his press conference, Pete Hegseth presented the strikes targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities as “historic,” pushing back against critics downplaying the operation’s impact.
“Our strikes ended the war and have pushed back Iran’s nuclear program for many years,” Hegseth said, accusing certain American media outlets of minimizing the scale of the mission. He also denounced what he described as “attempts to distort the facts and undermine President Trump’s leadership.”
Hegseth insisted that the conditions for ending the conflict were laid out by President Donald Trump himself, and described the strikes as “the most complex in U.S. military history.”
In response to a question about the Iranian uranium, he said: “I am not aware of any intelligence indicating that uranium from the Fordow facility was moved prior to the strike."
U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Keane praised, for its part, the “outstanding performance” of American pilots who carried out the raids. On Iran’s missile attack targeting Al-Udeid base in Qatar, he said, “We evacuated the base in advance based on actionable intelligence.”
Keane also revealed details of the attack on the underground Fordow nuclear site. A specialized U.S. team had studied the location for years to develop weapons capable of penetrating its deep fortifications. “The GBU-57 bunker-buster bombs were specifically developed to target this facility”, he said.
Journalists were shown video footage of the strikes and the resulting underground detonations.
General Keane also commented: "Our adversaries around the world should know that US forces are also studying targets for the same amount of time we studied Fordow."
The U.S. launched its attack early Sunday, after days of escalating violence between Iran and Israel. Since June 13, Israel had struck multiple Iranian military and nuclear sites, prompting retaliatory missile fire from Tehran. The U.S. targeted three major nuclear facilities in its operation.
But the true extent of the damage has become a matter of debate in Washington. A classified initial assessment, reported by CNN, concluded that the strikes may have only delayed Iran’s nuclear program by a few months and failed to destroy key components. Experts also raised the possibility that Iran had moved roughly 400 kilograms of enriched uranium to unknown locations ahead of the attack.
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