Marco Rubio says Iran is ‘much further away’ from nuclear weapon after US strikes

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Iran is now “much further away from a nuclear weapon,” dismissing CNN reports suggesting that US strikes failed to fully destroy Iran’s top nuclear sites.

In an interview with Politico during the NATO summit, Rubio defended the US military operation that targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, sites that President Donald Trump has said were “completely destroyed.”

“The bottom line is, they are much further away from a nuclear weapon today than they were before the president took this bold action,” Rubio said. “That’s the most important thing to understand — significant, very significant, substantial damage was done to a variety of different components, and we’re just learning more about it.”

His comments follow a report from CNN, citing a preliminary report by the Defense Intelligence Agency, which claimed the strikes only delayed Iran’s nuclear program by a few months. Rubio dismissed the report as “false” and politically motivated.

“I hate commenting on these stories, because often the first story is wrong and the person putting it out there has an agenda,” Rubio said. “That story is a false story, and it’s one that really shouldn’t be rereported because it doesn’t accurately reflect what’s happening.”

The White House has cited Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission, which said in a statement that the US strike on Fordo destroyed critical infrastructure and rendered the enrichment facility inoperable. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also pushed back against CNN’s claims, calling them “flat-out wrong” and attributing the leak to an “anonymous, low-level loser in the intelligence community.”

In his interview, Rubio addressed speculation that the US is pursuing regime change in Iran, saying that is not the objective of the Trump administration.

“The world is filled with regimes I don’t like and the president doesn’t like, and a lot of us wish didn’t exist. The United States’ job is not to go around and set up governments for every country,” he said.

“Our national security issue with Iran is with a clerical regime that wants nuclear weapons so they can threaten us, threaten Israel today, threaten us tomorrow. And the president’s made clear that’s not going to happen,” Rubio added.