David Sanger

The foreign minister of Iran tweeted it out again just before the president spoke.

No, you can't, Terry.

And of course, the problem is not what they say.

It is the evidence that has been gathered patiently over 20 years about work they did on weaponization, the conversion of nuclear material into actual weapons that could only be explained by either an active or a once active nuclear weapons program.

Now, for the president, he had a particular hurdle to cross here because, of course, the

He has said and said again in that clip that you played that their nuclear program was destroyed.

It wasn't, but the nuclear fuel was buried.

And while the Iranians may be trying to reconstitute their ability to enrich uranium, and we've seen some very modest evidence of that, if they don't have the fuel, and particularly the fuel that is closest to bomb grade, they can't make a bomb.

And there's no evidence I've seen that they are any place close to a missile that could reach the United States.

Well, if it sounds contradictory, that's because it truly is contradictory.

The attack on those three facilities, Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan, which were the largest enrichment facilities that Iran had,

were incredibly successful because they managed to implode the buildings down onto the centrifuges, the machines that spin at supersonic speed to purify uranium and turned it into bomb fuel.

and to bury the stockpiles, most of which were in Isfahan, of what's called 60% enriched uranium.

And that is to say uranium enriched to a level of purity that's just shy of bomb grade.

And it would only take a few weeks to bring that, maybe even a few days, to bring that from 60% up to bomb grade, which is 90%.

But the fact of the matter is the Iranians can't get at that fuel now.

It is buried down deep.

We have not seen any evidence that they've been able to remove any of it.

People are watching this site like a hawk, as you could imagine.

And so for Mr. Witkoff to step in and say, well, they're just within a hair's breadth of industrial-grade enriched uranium that you could use for bomb fuel, you might have been able to say that prior to the June attack.