President Donald Trump again claimed the “total obliteration” of the Iran nuclear program during the NATO summit in the Netherlands on Wednesday, dismissing a report of the early pentagon that suggests that the joint strikes of the United States and Israel at Tehran facilities may have delayed their program in a matter of months.
“I think it was total obliteration,” Trump told journalists who spoke along with NATO Secretary Mark Rutte in The Hague, Netherlands.
A preliminary analysis of the strikes by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central City Council of the United States caused questions such as the effectiveness of the operation. Two people familiar with the report told ABC News that he suggested that the strikes did limited damage and that Iran could relocate highly enriched uranium actions before the strikes occurred.
Later, on Wednesday, during a solo press conference, Trump continued to retreat to the first intelligence evaluations in the United States and said that US pilots who carried out the strikes were being degraded by news reports about the preliminary evaluation of the Pentagon.
“Since then, we have compiled additional intelligence,” he said. “We have also talked to people who have seen the site, and the site is erased, and we believe that everything that is not up to it is there. They did not take it out.”
President Donald Trump arrives to talk to the press after the NATO summit, on June 25, 2025 in The Hague, Netherlands.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
“They presented something that was not finished,” Trump said about US intelligence reports on the impact of US attacks. In the course of the press conference, Trump highlighted the Israeli and Iranian reports on the damage caused by the strike.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei said on Wednesday that the country’s nuclear facilities had been “seriously damaged”, as cited by Associated Press, an appointment that Trump repeated.
In Iran, Trump told journalists that he is not interested in restarting negotiations and did not see him as necessary. “The war is over,” he said.
“I no longer see that they will be involved in the nuclear business,” Trump said about Tehran.
This planet Labs PBC satellite image shows Iran’s underground nuclear enrichment site after US air attacks aimed at installation, on June 22, 2025.
PLANET LABS PBC/AP
Trump early on Wednesday insisted that Iran’s nuclear program had been “basically decades”, he added: “It has gone for years.”
“I think they didn’t have the opportunity to get anything, because we act quickly,” Trump said. “If I had taken two weeks, maybe. But it is very difficult to eliminate that type of material, very hard and very dangerous. In addition, they knew we were coming, and if they know we will come, they will not be there.”
When asked if they could rebuild and if the United States would attack again, Trump said that would be another person’s problem.
“I’m not going to have to worry about that,” he said. “It has gone for years, years, very difficult to rebuild, because everything collapses. In other words, inside, everything collapsed. No one can enter to see it, because it collapsed.”
When asked if he trusted American intelligence, the president said that the initial report was “very non -conclusive. Intelligence says we don’t know, it could have been very severe, that is what intelligence says. So I suppose it is correct, but I think we can take the” we don’t know. “
The Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegesh, and the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, also spoke in support of the president’s position, having accompanied Trump to The Hague.
“Given the 30,000 pounds of explosives and capacity of those ammunition, it was the devastation under Fordo,” Hegseth said.
“Any evaluation that tells you that it was otherwise speculated with other reasons,” Hegseth continued. “And we know that when you really look at the report, by the way, it was a high secret report, it was preliminary, it was little confidence.”
Hegseth suggested that the reporting of the report had “a political motive”, adding: “We are doing a leak with the FBI at this time because this information is for internal purposes.”
Rubio also said that the filtration of the preliminary report was politically motivated, saying that the attacks led to “total and total destruction.”
“But all these leaks, these leaks are professional stabbing,” he said. “These things come out and read, and then they tell you what he says against the law, but they characterize it in a way that is absolutely false.”
The report caused a greater dismay among Trump’s opponents in Washington. Sens. Jeanne Shaheen and Chris Coans told ABC News at the NATO summit that is too early to determine the success of US attacks, and added that the recent combat round could have been avoided if Trump had not retired from Iran’s nuclear agreement in his first mandate.
“The American public needs answers for what is really happening,” said Shaheen, a classification member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senior Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “If what we see is that Iran’s nuclear program has not been erased, then we must try to return to the negotiating table,” he added.
Shaheen said that more nuclear tensions are also possible, since Tehran can “convince its race to obtain a nuclear weapon is even more important, given the example of North Korea, and will do everything possible to get there as quickly as possible.”
President Donald Trump speaks at the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands, on June 25, 2025.
Piroschka Van de Wouw/Reuters
Meanwhile, Trump said that the high fire “is going very well” despite the continuous exchanges on Tuesday, which led him to criticize both Israel and Iran and to speak with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to warn him of other attacks.
“Israel returned yesterday,” he said. “I was very proud of them, because they returned, you know, they came out because they felt it was a rape. And they were right, but it would not have worked very well. And they brought the planes back.”
“They will not fight each other,” added Israel and Iran. “They have had it. They have had a great fight, like two children in a courtyard.
Trump said the United States strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities on Saturday proved to be decisive. “That blow ended the war,” he said, comparing the attacks by the United States atomic bomb against Japan at the end of World War II.
“I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima, I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki, but that was essentially the same as that war,” Trump said. “If we didn’t get that, they would have been, they would be fighting right now,” he continued.
The president expressed optimism about the future of US and Iranian relations.
“I think we will end up having a relationship with Iran,” he said. “I have had a relationship in the last four days. They agreed to high the fire, and it was a very the same agreement. They both said, that is enough. They both said it.”
Joe Simonetti, Luis Martínez, Anne Flaherty and Ivan Pereira of ABC News contributed to this report.
