On Tuesday afternoon, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth testified to Congress about the war with Iran, which, after four months of fighting and a highly touted ceasefire, has since devolved into a series of tit-for-tat attacks. When Hegseth wasn’t blaming former President Joe Biden for allegedly bequeathing him a toothless fighting force, he repeatedly claimed that the “overarching objective” of the Iran war is “ensuring Iran never has a nuclear weapon.”
It’s an assertion that administration officials have made since the day the war began, yet it doesn’t appear to be remotely true — and Democrats need to be saying it more loudly.
This is not to say that the U.S. doesn’t want to prevent Iran from building a nuclear bomb — it’s that the war the U.S. is actually waging has virtually nothing to do with Iran’s nuclear program.
Indeed, from the earliest days of the war, U.S. military strikes have been focused primarily on Iran’s leadership, its conventional military capabilities and its military-industrial base. Few if any of the attacks targeted Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
The Iran war has little to do with nukes.
Relying on U.S. classified assessments, Reuters reported in May that Iran’s nuclear capabilities are largely unchanged since last summer, when U.S. and Israeli planes attacked Iran’s nuclear reactors and enrichment facilities. But Iran is still approximately a year away from building a bomb, according to three sources familiar with the matter who spoke to Reuters.
Any effort to restart the program was made more difficult by last June’s U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, which — lest we forget — President Donald Trump has repeatedly insisted “obliterated” the country’s nuclear program.
Indeed, recent press reports indicate that Israeli intelligence believes that last fall Iran “moved thousands of uranium-enrichment centrifuges into tunnels deep inside a mountain” labeled Pickaxe Mountain. According to The Wall Street Journal, the installation “hasn’t been targeted in the round of fighting with the U.S. that began on Feb. 28.”
These facts, however, have not stopped Trump and Hegseth from repeatedly lying about Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
For example, they have claimed that Iran’s leaders are actively seeking to restart its program. But that claim is contradicted not only by U.S. intelligence, but also … by Trump administration officials.
For example, before the war even began, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Iran was not enriching nuclear fuel. Going back even further, in May 2025, then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Congress that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader [Ali] Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.” In the run-up to war, Trump’s lead negotiator, Steve Witkoff, said that Iran is “probably a week away from having industrial-grade bomb making material.” It’s an assertion that simply wasn’t true.
As was the case more than 20 years ago with the Bush administration’s ill-fated decision to go to war against Iraq, Trump administration officials have used the nuclear bogeyman as an excuse for war — and, like their predecessors, the have repeatedly misled the public about the nature of the threat.
In fact, on Wednesday, Trump even claimed that the 18 American soldiers who have died in the war said “very strongly” that “we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon” — thus completing the difficult task of both lying to Americans and disrespecting those killed in the war.
What is perhaps most galling about Hegseth’s comments on Tuesday is that he came to Congress, hat in hand, asking for close to $70 billion in taxpayer dollars to wage the Iran war while speaking of a potential threat — Iran’s nuclear program — that isn’t even being addressed by the U.S. military right now.
Trump even claimed that the 18 American soldiers who have died in the war said “very strongly” that “we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.”
Since July 8, U.S. forces have hit Iran on a near-daily basis. However, according to daily press releases put out by U.S. Central Command, which runs U.S. military operations in the Middle East, the focus of U.S. attacks is to “degrade Iran’s ability to continue attacking commercial vessels flowing through the Strait of Hormuz.”
U.S. military strikes have targeted Iranian air defenses, command-and-control networks, coastal radar and other surveillance capabilities, missile and drone launch sites, underground storage, and maritime assets, including naval bases and small boats. But there’s no indication that U.S. military strikes are targeting Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, or even the country’s missile production capabilities, which could be used to deliver a nuclear bomb — which, of course, doesn’t exist.
Instead, the U.S. is discretely focused on preventing Iran from blockading the Strait of Hormuz — a task that is only necessary because of Trump’s ill-advised decision to go to war in the first place.
Had the U.S. never attacked Iran last February, Tehran would still be a year away from building a nuclear weapon and the Persian Gulf would be open to maritime traffic. Going to war led to the closure of the strait, a global spike in oil prices, tens of billions in military costs and, above all, 18 U.S. service members killed in action.
No matter how Hegseth and others try to spin it, no matter their efforts to scare Americans into believing that the U.S. is fighting a war to keep a nuclear weapon out of Iran’s hands, the evidence is clear: The Iran war has little to do with nukes.
Trump, Hegseth and those in charge went to war for reasons that still remain unclear, and now, as the situation has spiraled deeply out of control, are ramping up their lies about it to the American people. Democrats who criticized Hegseth on Tuesday for exaggerating the impact of U.S. military strikes and referred to the war’s growing unpopularity need to make this point, loudly and consistently.
The U.S. is not fighting — and troops are not dying — to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. This war is continuing because of the rank incompetence and the repeated lies of America’s leaders.
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