US-Israel strikes blocked Iran’s nuclear missile plans, Israeli ambassador says

Joint US-Israel strikes under Operation Epic Fury have disrupted Iran’s nuclear missile program, destroying key command centers, missile launchers, and radar sites, the Israeli ambassador to the United States said on Tuesday.

The attacks prevented Tehran from pairing enriched uranium with missile delivery systems, a critical step toward producing nuclear weapons, Ambassador Yechiel (Michael) Leiter said in a video posted on X.

“Together with the United States and Epic Fury, we have eliminated most of the radar stations in western Iran, the missile launchers, both surface-to-surface and surface-to-air. Today in Tehran, we took out the fourth of the four command centers, three we took out yesterday, creating chaos within the ranks of the Ayatollah regime. This creates a chink in the chain of command where they’re not able to send messages down the system onto the field, and that’s part of the reason we’re seeing the chaos of the Iranians firing ballistic missiles into all its neighbors all at once," Leiter said.

“The most important site we took out today was a site where they intended to pair nuclear enriched uranium with a missile delivery system. See, that’s the issue. When you’re talking about nuclear missiles, you have to take a delivery system and the enriched uranium and pair them together. That’s key when it comes to timing, because if we would have delayed these operations, they would have reached a point very soon where this impenetrable site would not have been able to be destroyed, and that’s why we had to act," he added.

“Remember what special envoy Steve Witkoff said just last night in his first meeting with the Iranians. They admitted they have 642 kilograms of enriched uranium at 60%. To go from 60% to 90% would take one week, and that would give them 11 bombs. Then all they’d have to do is pair it with the missile delivery systems, and what they’re doing now would be something we couldn’t prevent," Leiter said.