Rubio Fleshes Out Trump’s Case That Iran Nuclear Capacity Was Eliminated
"Secretary of State Marco Rubio said U.S. strikes had destroyed a facility that is key to turning highly enriched nuclear fuel into a working bomb. He railed against a less optimistic U.S. intelligence report.
President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio made their most detailed case yet on Wednesday at a NATO summit in the Netherlands for why they believe the American attack on Iran dealt a fatal blow to its nuclear ambitions, pushing back on the findings of a U.S. intelligence report and more cautious statements from international nuclear inspectors.
While Mr. Trump largely repeated his assertions that Iran’s nuclear facilities were “obliterated,” Mr. Rubio stepped in with the first description of why he thought the attack had set back the Iranians’ progress for years rather than by only a few months, as a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency report said. His argument centered on evidence that a “conversion facility” — which is key to converting nuclear fuel from a gas into the form needed to produce a nuclear weapon — has been destroyed.
The question of whether Iran could recover from the strike on Sunday morning dominated the meeting of the 32 NATO nations. It overshadowed a major accomplishment for Mr. Trump: an agreement among most of the allies, with the notable exception of Spain, to spend 5 percent of their gross domestic product on defense within a decade as they face down Russian military aggression. Mr. Trump had demanded the increase and celebrated the moment, telling reporters during an hourlong news conference, “I began pushing for additional commitments in 2017.”
But his anger over the disclosure of the intelligence report on the effects of the strike against Iran was palpable. Mr. Trump accused news organizations that questioned how much damage had been done to Iran’s program of betraying “these brave patriots, these incredible fliers” who streaked halfway across the globe from Missouri to bomb the prime target, an enrichment plant called Fordo buried deep in a mountain. He and other administration officials repeatedly argued that because the attack had been executed so flawlessly, it was offensive to even question the results.
Mr. Trump also announced on Wednesday the United States and Iran would hold talks next week, though he provided no details about the participants or the purpose of the engagement. Diplomats from both countries had met repeatedly in recent months to try to negotiate over the future of Iran’s nuclear program, but Iran canceled a round after Israel launched strikes against it on June 13, and the two sides have not met since.
Iran is also threatening to stop cooperating with international inspectors, which would limit visibility into the damage done.
Yet, the president also downplayed the importance of a diplomatic agreement with Tehran over its nuclear program, expressing confidence that Iran would not pursue a nuclear weapon after the U.S. attacks.
“We may sign an agreement,” he said. “I don’t know. To me, I don’t think it’s that necessary. I mean, they had a war they fought. Now they’re going back to their world. I don’t care if I have an agreement or not.”
Iranian officials had indicated a day earlier that they were willing to re-engage in diplomacy.
But by the end of his trip to the Netherlands, Mr. Trump seemed as focused on proving he has “obliterated” Iran’s sites as he once was on proving he had the largest inauguration crowd. As part of his effort to counter the preliminary intelligence report from the Pentagon, Mr. Trump, during his news conference, read part of a statement from the Israel Atomic Energy Commission.
“The devastating U.S. strike on Fordo destroyed the site’s critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility totally inoperable,” the president said. The statement, which the White House had distributed earlier, did not contain the word “totally,” but Mr. Trump inserted it.
Administration officials also denied that Iran had moved its stockpile of 880 pounds of near-bomb-grade fuel from storage areas in the ancient city of Isfahan and at other plants in Iran. Some American intelligence officials say they believe it was moved, and Rafael Mariano Grossi, the secretary general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, part of the United Nations, said Iranian officials had told him the stockpile was going to be moved to avoid threats from Mr. Trump. On Wednesday, he said he did not know its whereabouts.
Moving the stockpile could have left Iran with a hidden supply that it could, with further enrichment, use for weapons.
Mr. Trump said he did know where the supply was. “We think we hit them so hard and so fast they didn’t get to move,” he told reporters, without citing any evidence. “It’s covered with granite, concrete and steel,” he said.
Near the end of his news conference, as Mr. Trump appeared to become increasingly fed up with questions about his own administration’s intelligence, he turned the lectern over to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose department’s intelligence agency had produced the assessment. After denouncing the news media, Mr. Hegseth did not dispute the accounts of the intelligence report that appeared in The New York Times and CNN, but emphasized that it had been produced with “low confidence.”
“So if you want to make an assessment of what happened at Fordo, you better get a big shovel and go really deep because Iran’s nuclear program is obliterated,” he said.
The director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, also insisted on Wednesday that the president was correct in saying that Iran’s facilities had been destroyed. She cited “new intelligence” but gave no additional details. Like Mr. Hegseth, she complained about news reports describing the intelligence document.
Mr. Rubio was the only one who approached the question with specific reference to facilities that Israel and the United States hit, and which would cripple Iran’s ability to make a bomb even if it had sufficient highly enriched uranium secreted away. His argument centered on evidence that the conversion facility had been destroyed, along with a laboratory to make the fuel into uranium metal to make a warhead.
Israel reported hitting the facility and an associated laboratory for turning the fuel to metal, and The Times described the hit at the time. Independent analysts say they believe the plant was severely damaged.
“You can’t do a nuclear weapon without a conversion facility,” said Mr. Rubio, who serves simultaneously as interim national security adviser. “We can’t even find where it is, where it used to be on the map,” he added, speaking of the conversion facility. “The whole thing is blackened out. It’s gone. It’s wiped out.”
Satellite photographs show extensive destruction, but not until international nuclear inspectors are allowed on the site will it be possible to know what it would take to rebuild, on the site or elsewhere.
The intelligence report focused largely on the state of the Fordo plant, which produced the near-bomb-grade fuel that would, ultimately, feed a conversion facility.
The United States used powerful “bunker buster” bombs to hit that plant. Officials familiar with the intelligence report said that early findings concluded that the strikes had set back Iran’s nuclear program by months. Officials said the strikes sealed off Fordo’s entrances, but had not led to a collapse, leaving open the possibility that Iran could eventually dig it out.
But the reason Iran most likely could still race to a bomb relatively quickly, officials said, is that it most likely retains much of its enriched uranium and most likely has secret nuclear facilities in which to process it further.
International inspectors and nuclear experts agree that the extensive damage to the conversion facility created a key bottleneck in the weapons-making process, and agreed that rebuilding it would most likely take years. But that assumes that Iran did not build another conversion plant in secret, as part of an insurance policy against the destruction of its declared facilities, which are inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The American attacks in Iran were focused on two elements of the nuclear program. The first was the two centers where enrichment was done, Natanz and Fordo. The second set of attacks was focused on facilities that could be used to turn the nuclear material into a weapon. Most of those were centered in Isfahan, including the conversion facility and the lab that produces uranium metal, which can be used in manufacturing a warhead.
The U.S. objective appeared to be to take out both parts of the production chain in the hopes of setting the Iranians back as far as possible.
In a separate assessment, David Albright and Spencer Faragasso of the nonpartisan Institute for Science and International Security, a nonprofit organization that follows the state of the Iranian program in depth, wrote on Wednesday that “Israel’s and U.S. attacks have effectively destroyed Iran’s centrifuge enrichment program.” They concluded that “it will be a long time before Iran comes anywhere near the capability it had before the attack.”
But their report noted that stocks of near-bomb-grade uranium and lesser-enriched materials remained, along with centrifuges that had been manufactured, but not yet installed. The same report noted that the conversion facility had been “severely damaged.”
Mr. Trump argued on Wednesday that Iran had essentially given up its nuclear ambitions, saying it is not “even thinking” about nuclear enrichment anymore, though he did not provide any evidence.
Mr. Rubio was more careful. “Now anything in the world can be rebuilt," he said, “but now we know where it is, and if they try to rebuild it, we’ll have an option there, as well.”
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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