It appears the Donald Trump administration is favoring an assessment from Israeli intelligence that Iran could obtain a nuclear weapon in as little as 15 days. Portions of the US intelligence community say Tehran has not decided to build a nuclear weapon, and would be at least a year away from building a functioning weapon. US intelligence also assesses that a US attack on Iran would provoke Tehran to develop a strategic weapon.
According to the New York Times on Thursday, “Some American officials said those new assessments echoed material provided by Mossad, which believes that Iran can achieve a nuclear weapon in 15 days.”
“While some American officials find the Israeli estimate credible, others emphasized that the U.S. intelligence assessment remained unchanged, and American spy agencies believe that it could take several months, and up to a year, for Iran to make a weapon,” The report explained.
In March, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. Officials speaking with CNN earlier this week said it could take three years for Tehran to build a strategic weapon and a delivery system.
However, Trump administration sources say Gabbard has been sidelined on the Iran issue. “National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, an outspoken critic of past US military interventions abroad, appears to have fallen out of favor with President Donald Trump as he weighs military action against Iran,” NBC News reported on Wednesday.
“Multiple senior administration officials said Gabbard has been sidelined in internal administration discussions about the conflict between Israel and Iran,” the report added.
Publicly, Trump has dismissed his top intelligence official. “I don’t care what [Gabbard ]said. I think [Iran] were very close to having [a nuclear weapon],” the President said aboard Air Force One earlier this week.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe appears to be one of the advocates of Mossad’s position within the White House. Breaking Points host Sagar Enjeti reports, “A senior US intelligence official tells me that there is ZERO independent US intelligence to back up CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s pronouncement that Iran is ‘at the one-yard line’ of a nuclear weapon.”
He continued, “All of the intelligence is from Israel.”
Yesterday I questioned @PressSec claim that Iran is “a few weeks” from a nuclear weapon
Turns out it is from Mossad and the US intel community doesn’t agree pic.twitter.com/gFOhsVuRDE
— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) June 20, 2025
The Times spoke with sources who said the Israeli assessment could be fabricated to meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s need to drag the US into the war. “Some officials believe Israeli assessments have been colored by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to gain American support for his military campaign against Iran,” the outlet reported.
Tel Aviv needs Washington to bomb some of Iran’s most fortified nuclear targets, such as Fordow. Some assessments say only the US, with its heavy bombers and 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs, could disable Fordow. However, the Pentagon believes Washington will have to use a nuclear weapon to destroy the site.
If President Trump authorized a direct strike on Iran’s nuclear sites, the US intelligence community believes it could push Tehran to finally attempt to build a strategic weapon. “Senior US intelligence officials said that Iranian leaders were likely to shift toward producing a bomb if the American military attacked the Iranian uranium enrichment site Fordo or if Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader,” the Times explained.
Kyle Anzalone is the opinion editor of Antiwar.com and news editor of the Libertarian Institute. He hosts The Kyle Anzalone Show and is co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Connor Freeman.
