Trump and U.S. intelligence appear at odds over Iran's nuclear progress

The U.S. assessment of Iran’s nuclear program has not changed since March when the director of national intelligence said that Tehran has large amounts of enriched uranium but has not made a decision to rush towards building an atomic bomb.
The U.S. assessment of Iran’s nuclear program has not changed since March, when the director of national intelligence told lawmakers that Tehran has large amounts of enriched uranium but has not made a decision to rush toward building an atomic bomb, according to the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and a source with knowledge of the matter.
Comments by President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have painted a different picture, suggesting that Iran is racing toward creating a nuclear weapon.
Trump said Wednesday that Iran was “a few weeks” from having a nuclear weapon, and Netanyahu said in a recent interview that Iran was pursuing a “secret plan” to build a bomb within months.
“The intel we got and we shared with the United States was absolutely clear, was absolutely clear that they were working on a secret plan to weaponize the uranium,” Netanyahu recently told Fox News. “They were marching very quickly. They would achieve a test device and possibly an initial device within months and certainly less than a year.”
U.S. intelligence reporting on Israel is typically based in part on information provided by Israel’s intelligence services. It was unclear whether Netanyahu’s remarks were based on a different interpretation of the same intelligence.
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