President Donald Trump compared the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities to the Hiroshima bombing during World War II as he pushed back on reports that his airstrikes caused far less damage than the president initially claimed.
Speaking to reporters ahead of a NATO summit in The Hague, Trump was frustrated with multiple reports that a U.S. intelligence analysis suggested in an early assessment that Iran’s nuclear program had been set back only a few months by the weekend attacks.
This contradicts Trump’s claim that the plants were “completely and fully obliterated.”
On Wednesday, Trump said of the Iran raid, “That hit ended the war.”
Drawing comparisons to the atomic bombings of Japan, he added: “I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima. I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki. But that was essentially the same thing. That ended that war.”
Trump also suggested the U.S. intelligence was “very inconclusive.”
“The intelligence says, ‘We don’t know, it could have been very severe.’ That’s what the intelligence says. So I guess that’s correct, but I think we can take the ‘we don’t know.’ It was very severe. It was obliteration,” Trump added.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ordered by U.S. President Harry Truman, remains the only use of nuclear weapons in war.
On Aug. 15, 1945, following the attack on Nagasaki, Japan surrendered, bringing World War II to an end. Around 200,000 people were killed by the attacks by the end of 1945.
By contrast, the U.S. Air Force’s B-2 Spirit stealth planes dropped 14 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on Saturday in a precision strike on Iran’s Fordo research site. A fragile ceasefire in the 12-day Iran-Israel conflict began about midnight Eastern on Tuesday.
