Iran nuclear sites left ruined in US and Israeli strikes but program ‘intact,’ deputy foreign minister

Iran’s deputy foreign minister Saeed Khatibzadeh has described his country’s nuclear program as still “intact” despite admitting that US and Israeli strikes badly damaged facilities earlier this year.

Frederik Pleitgen Sunday, Khatibzadeh said Iran’s “peaceful nuclear program is intact, as we are speaking,” adding that “we are going to be protecting that.”

The exact state of Iran’s facilities remains unclear following a 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June and US airstrikes against three of the country’s nuclear facilities – Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan – also that month.

US President Donald Trump initially claimed that Fordow had been obliterated. An early US intelligence assessment suggested the three nuclear facilities had been badly damaged, but that Iran’s nuclear program may have only been set back by up to two years.

While Khatibzadeh said that Israeli and US strikes had “ruined many of our infrastructure, machineries” and “buildings,” he noted that the nuclear program was “very much based on our indigenous knowledge, very much spread across our country, which is a huge country – 90 million people.”

“And this country is not a country that you can bomb and then think that you are going to ruin everything,” the minister said.

Khatibzadeh’s assessment comes as Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, said Sunday that no uranium enrichment was taking place “right now” because the country’s enrichment facilities had been “attacked.” The enrichment process produces fuel for nuclear power plants, which, at higher-enrichment levels, can also be used to make a nuclear bomb.