Trump Rejects Reports As Controversy Trails Outcome of US Attack On Iran
..Experts Say Facilities Not Destroyed
By Yadnom Awu/Asaba
American President, Donald Trump, has strongly disputed experts assessments that America s early Sunday military strikes had not destroyed Iran’ s nuclear facilities.
Early experts’ assessments indicate that while much of the outer parts of the Fordow underground nuclear facility were destroyed, there was no evidence that its interior was severely compromised.
Besides, they held that there was no credible evidence yet that the centrifuges, the core of any nuclear facility, were destroyed.
The experts whose assessment reports were leaked to the media, including the Cable News Network( CNN) and the New York Times, also held that Iran might have removed its consignment of enriched Uranium from the Fordow facility which is some 300 feet under a rocky mountain.
Estimates put the consignment at 400 kilogrammes of Uranium enriched to 60 per cent, enough to make a dirty bomb, and just one step away from the 90 per cent threshold needed to make a nuclear weapon.
But reacting to the leaked report, President Trump said that all such doubts were evil in intent and were meant to demean what he termed the most spectacular strike in global military history.
Trump accused the media and the experts who leaked the report as “fake” and mischievous in their attempt to discredit the military feat and his administration.
His Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, shared the same sentiments .
However, the Pentagon, the headquarters of the American military, differed, saying there was no evidence that the strikes , which involved 125 attack and other military aircraft which flew 18,000 kilometres to their targets in Iran, destroyed their targets.
In fact, American intelligence officials say the strikes could only set back Iran’ s nuclear programme by just three months.
The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, had hailed the strike, saying that they had helped remove an imminent existential threat to Israel.
The Sunday morning strikes by America were the first time that the country was deploying its B-2 Bombers and the GB-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators, MOPS, the biggest Non- nuclear bomb in its arsenal
