President Donald Trump said Thursday that only the United States and China have the capability to retrieve enriched uranium from Iran’s deeply buried nuclear sites, while maintaining that recent U.S. strikes severely damaged the facilities and made any recovery effort difficult. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump said the targeted nuclear sites were “obliterated” by U.S. military action. “We attacked their nuclear sites, and they were obliterated,” Trump said.
He also pushed back on media reports questioning the extent of the damage. “It turned out that, you know, CNN was wrong. They said, ‘Well, maybe they weren’t hit that hard.’ They were hit so hard, nobody knows if you could even get it out,” he said. Trump said the United States and China are the only countries with equipment powerful enough to reach material buried beneath the sites. “But the only ones that have the capability of getting it out are us and China,” Trump said.
