By Olivier Knox | US News | June 25, 2025
U.S. warplanes and Tomahawk missiles hit the targets they meant to hit. The stealth bombers then exited Iranian airspace with no losses. Day-after satellite imagery suggested significant damage – it’s not all obvious because one of the sites is burrowed into a mountain.
The United Nations nuclear watchdog agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said that even if American bombs did not reach all the way into Iran’s underground facilities, “given the explosive payload utilized, and the extreme vibration-sensitive nature of centrifuges, very significant damage is expected to have occurred.”
• The U.S. strikes came after an Israeli campaign targeting top Iranian nuclear scientists, reportedly killing at least 14 of them. Israel also systematically went after the SPND, which is basically a military research and development arm of the Iranian military and is thought to oversee the country’s nuclear program.
On a deeper level, we’re left with a lot of questions: What’s the state of Iran’s nuclear and missile programs? Did Iranian stockpiles of enriched uranium survive? Can the Iranians rebuild? Will they choose to do so? Did the strikes ruin chances of negotiations between Washington and Tehran?
On the last one, Trump said on the sidelines of a NATO summit in The Hague that he expected talks to resume next week.
‘OBLITERATED.’ Or Maybe Not?
In remarks to the nation from the White House, Trump quickly declared the strikes had “completely and fully obliterated” Iran’s principal sites for uranium enrichment – a process central to building an atomic weapon.
Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Iranian facilities had suffered “extremely severe damage and destruction” and that it would take time to assess the actual results.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared “our bombing campaign obliterated Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons.”
On Tuesday, The New York Times and other outlets reported that a preliminary, classified Defense Intelligence Agency assessment found that the weekend strikes only set back Iran’s nuclear program by a few months, citing officials familiar with the DIA’s findings.
• According to the DIA report, the strikes sealed off the entrances to two of the three principal targets but did not collapse their underground operations.
• The assessment also said Iran moved much of its stockpile of enriched uranium before the strikes. “Some of that may have been moved to secret nuclear sites maintained by Iran,” the Times said.
• U.S. officials pointedly noted that the DIA’s findings were “low confidence.”
• The White House promptly denounced “fake news.” And Trump condemned CNN, MSNBC and The New York Times as “scum.”
But appearing on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Vice President JD Vance had implicitly acknowledged that some amount of Iran’s uranium stocks was unaccounted for.
“We’re going to work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel,” Vance said. “And that’s one of the things that we’re going to have conversations with the Iranians about.”
The ‘BDA’
Get ready to hear a lot more pundits and officials refer to “the BDA.” That’s “battle-damage assessment.”
To understand the road from here, I reached out to Eric Edelman, a diplomat by training who has served in senior positions at the departments of State and Defense, and is someone I have known for years.
“BDA is always tricky and first reports are not usually reliable,” Eric cautions. But, he says, “‘obliterated’ is not a term that any serious military or intel(ligence) analyst would use.”
“It may be a few weeks or more before people will be able to come to reasonable judgment about how effective the Israeli and U.S. bombing has been on degrading the Iranian program,” Eric says, while noting that experts think Iran’s atomic ambitions have been severely set back.
• A comprehensive BDA will include MASINT (measurement and signature intelligence) to assess damage to Iran’s Fordo site, dug into a mountain. The word Eric used is “subsidence,” which I did not know. It’s basically “how much a given stretch of land caved in.”
• There will also be COMINT (communications intelligence, like intercepted phone calls), SIGINT (signals intelligence, any intercepted electronic messaging).
“The proliferation of open-source intelligence seems to have turned everybody and their brother into an expert but there are a lot of variables at play here and assessments are always tinged with a range of uncertainties,” Eric says.
So now, we wait.
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