Assessing the Iran Strike Battle Damage Assessments

By Mark Antonio Wright

Thursday, June 26, 2025

 

At this stage, I’m inclined to accept as more likely than not the view held by the Pentagon, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and — in my view most significantly — the Israeli government that Iran’s nuclear weapons program was dealt a very significant blow by the air strikes ordered by President Trump.

 

Americans can be forgiven for taking Donald Trump’s emphatic pronouncements on this matter with a grain of salt or two. We have grown very used to anything associated with Trump to be the biggest, the best, the greatest of all time, etc. — at least when described as such by Trump himself. When Trump told the world that the Iranian nuclear sites had suffered “total obliteration,” it was prudent to wonder whether that meant “total obliteration” in the Trumpian sense or “total obliteration” in the eyes of a neutral observer.

 

The controversy was kicked off by the New York Times and CNN reporting that a preliminary, classified Defense Intelligence Agency report assessed that the bombings had set back Iran’s nuclear program by only a few months.

 

That analysis has now been forcefully contradicted by the White House press office, by Trump himself, and — in a more measured fashion — by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretaries of state and defense.

 

And, again, it’s also been contradicted by the Israeli government. That, in my view, is the most significant opinion for three reasons: (1) it seems quite clear now that Israel had a very good intelligence site picture on the Iranian nuclear weapons program before the campaign began, (2) the Iran nuclear program is an existential threat to Israel, and (3) Prime Minister Netanyahu views the destruction of the Iranian nuclear program as fundamental to his personal legacy.

 

On Wednesday, Noah Rothman summed up the growing Israeli consensus well:

 

The Israelis, who have a sophisticated intelligence network throughout Iran and human sources on the ground, believe the strikes produced “extremely severe damage and destruction” at Iran’s nuclear sites and support facilities. “Nobody is disappointed here,” one Israeli official told Axios’s Barak Ravid. “We doubt that these facilities can be activated any time in the near future,” another official remarked.

 

To some extent, the Israeli outlook changes depending on the person to whom you’re speaking. One unnamed Israeli “source” told ABC News the outcome at the Fordow enrichment plant, for example, was “really not good.” But, in that same report, another “source with knowledge of the Israeli intelligence assessment” said the facility had been “damaged beyond repair.”

 

If Israel thought that the job wasn’t finished, would the Israeli government and Bibi really be willing to agree to a cease-fire? I think the evidence and the history of the Israeli state tell us that they would not be.

 

Regardless — and this goes whether we think Iran has been set back months, or years, or metaphysically forever — if the ayatollahs decide to return to working on their clandestine nuclear program, it will require Israel and/or the United States to at some point “mow the lawn.”

 

The strikes look like they were a success — and the world is better off today than it was two weeks ago, thanks to the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump.

 

But the problem of the Iranian nuclear program isn’t over — unless, that is, the Iranians themselves want it to be.