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The assessment came as experts are trying to determine how long it would take Iran to rebuild its nuclear program in the aftermath of U.S. and Israeli strikes.
David E. Sanger, a White House and national security correspondent, has reported on the Iranian nuclear program for more than two decades.
July 10, 2025Updated 2:52 p.m. ET
Israel has concluded that some of Iran’s underground stockpile of near-bomb-grade enriched uranium survived American and Israeli attacks last month and may be accessible to Iranian nuclear engineers, according to a senior Israeli official.
The senior official also said that Israel had begun moving toward military action against Iran late last year after seeing what the official described as a race to build a bomb as part of a secret Iranian project. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.
The official said Israeli intelligence picked up the nuclear weapons activity soon after the Israeli Air Force killed Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia in Lebanon. That observation prompted the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to prepare for an attack with or without U.S. help.
In the days surrounding Israel’s attack on Iran in mid-June, and President Trump’s subsequent decision to join in the action, U.S. intelligence officials said they had seen no evidence of a move by Iran to weaponize its stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium. The United States struck two of Iran’s most critical enrichment sites with 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs and aimed a barrage of submarine-launched Tomahawk missiles at a third site, where the fuel could be converted for use in weapons.
The Israeli official said the evidence gathered about the secret program — which the official did not describe in any detail — had been fully shared with the United States.
But in interviews in January, American officials said they did not believe Iran was yet racing for a weapon, even though they described a nascent effort to explore “faster, cruder” approaches to building one. And the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, told Congress in testimony in March that she saw no evidence the Iranians had decided to build a weapon, a position intelligence officials reiterated in June.
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