US intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard now backs Trump’s claim Iran could have nuclear weapon in ‘weeks’ Two hours after Donald Trump again said that she was wrong to cast doubt on his claim that Iran could have a nuclear weapon “within a matter of weeks”, his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, posted a statement on social media saying that she agrees with the president.
Twice this week, Trump was confronted by reporters with Gabbard’s testimony to Congress in March, in which she said that the US intelligence community, made up of 18 elements she oversees, “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamanei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003”.
On both occasions he dismissed what Gabbard had said, although it was not her assessment, but the consensus of US intelligence analysts.
Writing on X on Friday, after Trump told reporters, “She’s wrong”, Gabbard blamed what she called “dishonest media” for “taking my testimony out of context and spreading fake news as a way to manufacture division”.
She also shared video of a longer portion of her testimony on Iran, which included the statement that Iran had abandoned its pursuit of nuclear weapons 22 years ago.
In her testimony, Gabbard also said that the intelligence community “is closely monitoring if Tehran decides to reauthorize its nuclear weapons program. In the past year, we have seen an erosion of a decades-long taboo in Iran on discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus. Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile is at its highest levels and is unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”
Trump was reportedly irked by another recent social media post from Gabbard, a highly produced YouTube video uploaded to her personal account 10 days ago, in which she described a recent visit to Hiroshima, and warned of the “madness” of “a nuclear holocaust”.
Tulsi Gabbard’s YouTube video on her visit to Hiroshima. The video featured images of Gabbard in Hiroshima (those images are uncredited, but she has returned from foreign travel in the past, for instance to Syria in 2017, with video shot by her husband, Abraham Williams, a cinematographer). It also included a section in which she described how much more powerful the current generation of nuclear warheads are by comparison.
As my colleague Hugo Lowell reported this week, some Pentagon officials believe that only a US nuclear weapon could be capable of destroying Iran’s underground enrichment facility at Fordow, near the city of Qom.
In response to that report, Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on nuclear nonproliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, pointed out that a potential US nuclear strike on Fordow could be carried out with “a strategic B61-11 nuclear earth penetrator with a yield of 300 or 400 kilotons”. The bomb the US dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 was 15 kilotons.