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  "path": "/post/209949/donald-trump-iran-war-nuclear-weapon-timeline",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-05T14:29:40.000Z",
  "site": "https://newrepublic.com",
  "tags": [
    "Breaking News",
    "Politics",
    "Republican Party",
    "Donald Trump",
    "Middle East",
    "War",
    "Iran",
    "Nuclear Weapons",
    "Nuclear Enrichment",
    "Iran Nuclear Deal",
    "nuclear power",
    "uranium",
    "$25 billion",
    "Reuters",
    "11-ton stockpile of enriched uranium",
    "resignation letter"
  ],
  "textContent": "The war in Iran has done very little damage to the country’s nuclear capabilities, according to U.S. intelligence assessments.\n\nSo far, America has been at war with Iran for more than nine weeks and spent at least $25 billion in the process. The regional conflict has damaged strategic alliances, stalled global trade, and thrust the world into an energy crisis due to the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. It has also killed thousands of people.\n\nAnd yet assessments of Tehran’s nuclear program remain largely unchanged from roughly a year ago, when Donald Trump ordered strikes on three of Iran’s nuclear sites, hitting Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan on June 22.\n\nPrior to the June attack, U.S. analysts believed that Iran had the capacity to build a nuclear bomb within three to six months, according to three sources familiar ‌with the matter that spoke with Reuters Monday night. Afterward, U.S. analysts estimated that the attack—internally referred to as Operation Midnight Hammer—changed the Islamic Republic’s nuclear timeline back to about nine months to a year.\n\nThat estimate is still the same, according to Reuters’s unnamed sources.\n\nSince February 28, the majority of U.S. and Israeli attacks have focused on hitting conventional military targets in Iran. The stagnant timeline suggests that such a strategy is not effective at diminishing Iran’s nuclear capabilities. To do that may require the destruction or removal of Iran’s remaining stockpile of highly enriched uranium, or HEU, reported Reuters.\n\nIran lacked a single bomb’s worth of uranium in 2018, three years after former President Barack Obama brokered the Iran Nuclear Deal to limit the country’s enormous uranium stockpile. But that changed when Trump withdrew the U.S. from the pact and imposed a series of tough economic sanctions against the Middle Eastern country.\n\nBy 2025, Iran had curated an 11-ton stockpile of enriched uranium, the whereabouts of which remain largely unknown. The total HEU stockpile could create as many as 10 bombs if fully enriched, according to a 2025 assessment by the International Atomic Energy Agency.\n\nTrump has previously stated that his primary objective in the war was to completely eliminate Iran’s nuclear capabilities, but his administration has not been consistent in relaying its mission progress to the general public.\n\nIn the immediate aftermath of Operation Midnight Hammer, Trump and his administration claimed that Iran’s nuclear production was set back by multiple “years.” Yet former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent suddenly resigned over the issue in March, writing in his resignation letter that he could not “in good conscience” support the war in Iran because the country “posed no imminent threat to our nation.”",
  "title": "Trump’s Iran War Is a Bigger Bust Than We Knew, Leaked Info Shows"
}