WASHINGTON — The chief United Nations nuclear inspector has widened the divide with the Trump administration over how severely the United States set back Iran’s nuclear program, declaring that it could be enriching uranium in a “matter of months” even as President Donald Trump repeated his claim that Iran had lost interest in the effort.

“Frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there,” Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in an interview with CBS News that aired Sunday.

He said that when the United States dropped 14 bunker-busting bombs on Iran’s two uranium enrichment centers, the damage was “severe” but not “total.” In previous interviews, he said he believed that all of the more than 18,000 centrifuges had been destroyed or damaged and knocked out of operation.

Grossi’s analysis — one that several European intelligence agencies share — is consistent with a preliminary assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency that was widely reported on last week. That report estimated that the strike set back the Iranian nuclear program by only a few months.

The Defense Intelligence Agency report appeared to focus on the enrichment process at the sites where the GBU-57 bunker-busters, among the most powerful in the U.S. arsenal, were used. Later analysis by outside groups suggested that the biggest loss for Iran might have been the destruction of facilities to turn that fuel into a weapon.

But in an interview over the weekend, Trump repeated his insistence that Iran had given up its nuclear ambitions because the American attack had “obliterated” its facilities.

Trump also repeated statements he has made in recent weeks that he does not believe intelligence agency suspicions that the Iranians moved parts of their stockpile to new locations before the American attack in the early hours of June 22 in Iran.

But the IAEA reported that the stockpiles of near-bomb-grade uranium it saw before the strike had been stored in containers that could fit in the back of a car, and Grossi noted that he had been told by Iranian officials that the canisters would be relocated.

Some U.S. intelligence agencies believe it is very possible that vehicles seen outside a facility in the ancient city of Isfahan, where the majority of the stockpile was stored, may have been transferring it in the days before the strike.