US airstrikes on Iran set back the country’s nuclear programme by one to two years, a Pentagon spokesman said, adding to uncertainty around the status of the country’s facilities after President Donald Trump said they’d been obliterated. Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said allies share the US sentiment about the degradation of Iran’s nuclear abilities “and the fact that we have degraded their programme by one to two years – at least the intel assessments inside the department assess that.” “And I think their intelligence shares that conclusion,” he said. He said the US assessment remains that the facilities struck by the US had been “completely obliterated.” “We also believe that the degradation of the facilities at Fordow, Esfahan and Natanz degraded their physical capability of constructing a bomb,” he said. Parnell’s comments echo those of President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly asserted that the US bombing of key facilities “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear programme. His administration also has rejected a preliminary assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency that said the strikes may have set back the programme by just months. There’s still little information from the ground as Iran is said to have cut off communication with officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s nuclear watchdog. Iranian nuclear safety regulators have stopped taking calls from the IAEA after formally ending inspections last week, Bloomberg News reported.

Full report : Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell says US bombing of Iran’s nuke facilities set it back by at least 2 years.