Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell speaks during a news briefing at the Pentagon, Wednesday, July 2, 2025, in Arlington, Va. (Mark Schiefelbein/AP)
WASHINGTON — Pentagon officials have assessed Iran’s nuclear program has been set back by one to two years because of the recent U.S. bombing raid on three major facilities in that country, a Defense Department spokesman said Wednesday.
“I think we’re thinking probably closer to two years, like degraded their program by two years,” chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said. “What we’ve seen, in fact just universally among our allies, was them congratulating the United States ... on that bold operation and the idea that American action in Iran has set the conditions for global stability.”
Beginning overnight June 20 and into June 21, the U.S. attacked Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz in a mission dubbed Operation Midnight Hammer. Seven B-2 Spirit stealth bombers flew 18-hour flights with minimal communications to the target area, where they launched more than a dozen bunker-buster bombs on the sites meant to penetrate and destroy the underground facilities.
At Fordo, six bombs were dropped, in part to blow concrete caps off the facility’s ventilation shafts put in place by the Iranians in an effort to prevent the attack. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said June 22 that the bombs went “exactly where they were intended to go” and the mission was a “historically successful attack.”
Parnell added Wednesday that the Pentagon still maintains the strikes left the sites “completely obliterated.” He did not provide further information on how such as assessment was reached.
Initial reports on the strike indicated Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium was not destroyed and intelligence suggested uranium was moved from sites prior to the U.S. strikes. A preliminary report from the Defense Intelligence Agency, a part of the Defense Department, assessed in the days following that the airstrikes set Iran’s nuclear program back by months but did not eliminate it.
The Pentagon’s top leaders held a news briefing last week to emphasize how effective the military mission was and show the destruction that it caused.
“Ultimately, we’re here to clarify what these weapons are capable of, which anyone with … two eyes, some ears and a brain can recognize that kind of firepower with that specificity at that location and others, is going to have a devastating effect,” Hegseth told reporters during the news conference at the time.
More than 125 aircraft participated in the mission, including the B-2 bombers, fighter jets, refueling planes and surveillance aircraft. A U.S. submarine also launched more than two dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles on infrastructure targets at the Isfahan site.
Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Iran could begin producing enriched uranium again in “a matter of months” as damage caused by U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities was “severe” but “not total.”
Parnell on Wednesday said: “Our assessment of Iran’s nuclear program remains unchanged.”
“We believe that sending bombers from Missouri, 36 hours on a mission, not a single shot fired at them took a very strong psychological toll on Iranian leadership. It’s not just enriched uranium or centrifuges or things like that,” he said. “We destroyed the components that they would need to build a bomb. We believe that Iran’s nuclear capability has been severely degraded, perhaps even their ambition to build a bomb.”
