As President Donald Trump edges closer to potentially bombing Tehran, Iran, the intelligence community does not yet believe Iran is moving toward a nuclear weapon.
‘If they don’t do a deal, there will be bombing,’ Trump said Sunday. It was not clear whether that meant Israel or the U.S. would bomb Tehran. ‘There’s a chance that if they don’t make a deal, that I will do secondary tariffs on them like I did four years ago,’ he added.
Secondary ‘tariffs,’ or sanctions, would mean slapping financial penalties on any country that does business with Iran.
However, Trump’s threat of direct war on Tehran comes just after Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard insisted last week Iran is not building a nuclear weapon – at least not yet.
‘The IC [intelligence community] continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapon program that he suspended in 2003,’ Gabbard told a worldwide threat hearing held by the Senate Intelligence Community last week.
Experts believe Iran is enriching uranium to 60%, which puts it just below the 90% needed for a nuclear weapon, and have said there is no civilian use for 60% enriched uranium.
‘The IC continues to monitor closely if Tehran decides to reauthorize its nuclear weapons program. In the past year we’ve seen an erosion in the decades-long taboo in Iran of discussing nuclear weapons in public, likely emboldening nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision making apparatus,’ Gabbard said.
She added that Iran’s uranium enrichment was ‘at its highest levels’ and is ‘unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.’
The IC’s annual threat assessment, released in conjunction with the hearing, predicted Iran would continue efforts to threaten U.S. citizens and conduct operations inside the U.S.
‘Tehran will try to leverage its robust missile capability and expanded nuclear program, and its diplomatic outreach to regional states and U.S. rivals to bolster its regional influence and ensure regime survival,’ the report said. ‘However, regional and domestic challenges, most immediately tensions with Israel, are seriously testing Iran’s ambitions and capabilities.’
The report detailed the ‘lethality’ of Iran’s missiles and UAV systems but said little else about the threat of Iran’s nuclear program.
It assessed Iran’s capabilities, degraded by Israel, would be able to deter further offensive Israeli actions.
‘The IC assesses Iran’s prospects for reconstituting force losses and posing a credible deterrent, particularly to Israeli actions, are dim in the near-term,’ the report said.
JINSA President and CEO Michael Makovsky offered a separate assessment, telling Fox News Digital, ‘Their enrichment program is about as far as you can get, so that part is done. So the question is the weapons part.… the issue today is less weaponization and more about opportunity.’
Behnam Ben Taleblu, an analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, added a broader critique. ‘When the IC, reporters or open-source analysts fail to connect the dots between strategy, capability and intention when looking at Iran’s atomic infrastructure … they do a public disservice to the public national debate.’
He said that worldwide threat assessments ‘should but be politicized,’ but ‘intelligence officials must be asked, if Iran isn’t building a weapon, why has it invested so much time, labor and capital into this quest?’
Tehran’s moves toward an atomic weapon is not a dash, but a ‘slow and steady quest to develop the world’s most dangerous weapons as safely as possible,’ said Taleblu.
The renewed threat comes as the U.S. is bolstering its forces in the Middle East. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently sent a second aircraft carrier, USS Carl Vinson, to join the USS Harry S. Truman carrier strike group, whose deployment was also extended.
The U.S. also recently deployed two B-2 stealth bombers to the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean, a warning to Iran and Yemen’s Houthi militia. The planes are capable of carrying 30,000-pound ‘bunker buster’ bombs and are now situated within range of Iran.
In his first term, Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal signed by then-President Barack Obama, deeming it a ‘bad deal’ that did not curb Iran’s nuclear program.
He has already ordered his administration to bring ‘maximum pressure’ back to Tehran, choking them financially from every lever of government.