Enriched uranium stockpile undercuts Trump claim of Iran’s ‘essential denuclearization’

President Donald Trump often says the media never acknowledges his administration’s wins, including what he considers progress on the Iran war.

This article originally appeared on PolitiFact.com.

Trump listed “the essential Denuclearization of Iran” as one of many accomplishments in an Aug. 16 Truth Social post targeting a Fox News anchor.

Has the U.S. denuclearized Iran?

When we asked the White House for evidence, spokesperson Olivia Wales said military operations under Trump “obliterated Iran’s nuclear facilities, sunk their navy, wiped out Iran’s defense industrial base, and continues to strangle what’s left of their economy with one of the most successful naval blockades in history.”

“The United States and our allies are already safer” because of the war the U.S. launched Feb. 28, Wales said.

Iran has barred international inspectors from its nuclear facilities, so information about their status is hard to come by. Still, nuclear specialists told PolitiFact they are dubious that anything close to “essential denuclearization” has occurred during Trump’s second term.

The 2025 U.S. military strikes likely set back Iran’s nuclear program, but they did not eliminate it, and the attacks in this year’s war have not further weakened Iran’s nuclear capabilities, military and nuclear experts said. The U.S. has not secured Iran’s highly enriched uranium, and it’s unclear whether any damage has been done to the machinery used to enrich more uranium.

Paradoxically, the U.S. war on Iran may have strengthened hardliners’ grip on power within the Iranian regime, increasing the leadership’s desire for a nuclear weapon and complicating future diplomatic efforts to curb nuclear weaponization.

“There is no solid evidence to support the idea that Iran has lost the desire to produce a nuclear weapon,” said Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. “If anything, there is more rhetoric in Iran about moving toward weapons rather than denuclearization.”

Denuclearization remains a key war aim, but progress appears limited

The U.S. has tried for years to curb Iran’s nuclear capabilities, including signing a 2015 agreement that eased sanctions on Iran in exchange for limits on nuclear weapons-related activities and requirements that Iran allow international inspectors for compliance. Trump withdrew from that agreement in 2018.

In June 2025, the U.S. and Israel bombed Iranian nuclear sites. Trump’s frequent claim that these bombardments “obliterated” those sites is exaggerated, but it was a setback for Iran’s nuclear capabilities.

“Iran’s nuclear program was significantly degraded” in the 2025 attacks, Nephew said, making it “difficult and time-consuming for Iran to reconstitute the program lost, especially under threat of further attack.”

Trump cited Iran’s nuclear capabilities as one of the reasons he decided to go to war against Iran, and he has continued to repeat the goal of denuclearization in recent public comments. “I’m in this thing for one primary reason — that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said in an Aug. 11 interview with Wayne Allyn Root, a conservative broadcaster.

Today, Iran and the U.S. remain far apart in ending the conflict. A 60-day memorandum of understanding that led to a ceasefire expired Aug. 17. That memorandum was supposed to have paved the way for talks on Iran’s nuclear program.

Although it’s unlikely that Iran has any functioning uranium enrichment facilities today, it still has enough highly enriched uranium stockpiled to be able to produce a dozen or more nuclear weapons over time, said Matthew Bunn, a specialist in nuclear policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. Iran likely also has stocks of advanced centrifuges and components that may be stored out of reach of even the strongest U.S. bombs.

Even if Iran were to start from scratch in a bid to build a nuclear weapon, it could probably produce one “in a couple of years, given the knowledge it has learned” to date, Nephew said.

The war could impede a diplomatic solution

Experts said the two tracks for denuclearizing Iran involve military and diplomatic efforts, or a combination of the two. The ongoing war made the diplomatic track more difficult.

Any military operation to seize and remove highly enriched uranium or destroy vital machinery would likely require a substantial number of troops on the ground — a significant and risky escalation — and may not be feasible if the materials being sought are well concealed.

Because “the military options of acceptable risk are close to exhausted,” the alternative would be a diplomatic push, said Brendan Green, a University of Cincinnati political scientist who specializes in nuclear policy. The problem is that the U.S. attacks have so far made Iran’s leadership less amenable to a nuclear deal.

“Iran now has a more radical, hard-line regime, more dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and having been struck twice in a year by the United States and Israel, it is likely more motivated to get nuclear weapons to deter further attacks than ever before,” Bunn said. “An effective diplomatic agreement, with tight restraints and in-depth inspections, would do the most to reduce the risks, but is now highly unlikely.”

Establishing good-faith negotiations toward denuclearization likely depends on getting regime change so that Iran becomes a more “normal” country, said John Pike, director of globalsecurity.org, a think tank.

Regime change is another war goal that hasn’t been met.

This article originally appeared on PolitiFact.com. It is republished here as part of a reporting and fact-checking partnership between PolitiFact and Hearst Television.