David Sanger

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.

You can't say it today.

Fascinating question because the president has offered four different rationales for the current military buildup there.

One of them, the one you heard about the most in the State of the Union address there, was the nuclear program.

But the precipitating reason for the buildup was that the president promised to come to the aid of the protesters who had been on the streets.

And he talked about that a bit last night as well.

And he said that there had been 32,000 protesters killed.

during the uprisings in January.