U.S. warplanes strike three Iranian nuclear sites in sweeping attack

The U.S. military carried out sweeping strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities, President Donald Trump said late Saturday, marking a major escalation for his administration that tethers the United States directly to a conflict with no clear outcome or end in sight.

The president said in a social media post that U.S. warplanes had carried out a “very successful attack” on three sites, including the subterranean Fordow nuclear enrichment facility, a key target that Trump had openly deliberated striking for days.

“A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow,” Trump said. “All planes are safely on the way home.”

The president did not immediately say what kind of aircraft was used, but the strikes came after a fleet of B-2 Spirit bombers departed Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri overnight Friday into Saturday, a U.S. official familiar with the issue said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

The assault followed days of mixed messaging from the Trump administration. The president had warned all of Tehran to evacuate, demanded the Iranian government’s “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER” and threatened that its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would be targeted unless demands were met. Trump shifted again Thursday, saying he would wait as long as two weeks before deciding to attack, apparently signaling that he was intent on giving more time for diplomacy to work.

While the United States and Iran have fought deadly proxy battles for nearly a half-century in Lebanon, Yemen, the Straits of Hormuz and elsewhere, Trump’s action was the first significant U.S. military strike on Iranian soil since the 1979 overthrow of the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Trump’s decision to enter the conflict raises immediate questions about how Iran or its proxies may react, even as scores of Israeli strikes have left Iranian military capabilities diminished. Iran has threatened to retaliate against U.S. troops, tens of thousands of whom are deployed throughout the Middle East in countries such as Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Two defense officials, speaking Friday on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said that U.S. troops remained in a defensive posture in the region as the administration deliberated its next actions.

The Pentagon moved additional weapons and resources to the Middle East and Europe, including a fleet of aerial refueling planes and a second aircraft carrier and associated warships. The USS Carl Vinson, with about 5,000 sailors and dozens of aircraft aboard, was holding in the Arabian Sea as of Friday, defense officials said. The USS Nimitz, another carrier, was in the Indian Ocean steaming west toward the Middle East, after canceling a port stop in Vietnam. Navy destroyers with ballistic missile-defense capabilities also were arrayed across the region and in the Mediterranean Sea.

Much of the Middle East has been on edge since October 2023, when Hamas – one of several militant groups backed by Tehran – carried out an unprecedented attack on Israel that ignited the Gaza war and set in motion an audacious Israeli campaign to weaken Iran and dismantle its network of proxies.

Before Trump’s return to office, the Biden administration had sent Israel billions of dollars in military aid while taking pains to avoid provoking Iran, for fear of destabilizing the region. Trump, who campaigned on a desire not to start any wars, had sought to secure a deal with Tehran to curtail its nuclear program.

Yet, dating to his first term, he has also shown a willingness to strike Iran in ways other U.S. presidents have not. In January 2020, he ordered a drone strike in Iraq that killed Qasem Soleimani, an Iranian general who had for years organized proxy forces to attack U.S. and Israeli troops and interests. Iran responded then with ballistic missile attacks on U.S. military positions in Iraq, injuring dozens of U.S. troops but not causing any fatalities.

In recent days, Trump cycled between urging Iran’s leaders to sign a new deal agreeing not to build a nuclear weapon and pledging to ensure Iran could not do so. During his first administration, Trump ripped up a 2015 agreement that the U.S. and other world powers reached to limit Tehran’s nuclear program, criticizing it as insufficient.

The possibility of U.S. military action appeared to rise in recent days, especially after Trump returned to Washington early Monday from a Group of Seven summit in Canada with other world leaders. The president, in a social media post, said then that Iran should have heeded his warnings.

“What a shame, and waste of human life,” Trump wrote, telling civilians in Tehran to flee. By Tuesday, moments before he demanded the Iranian government’s surrender, the president said that Khamenei’s precise location in hiding was known to the U.S. and that he would be “an easy target.”

“We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now,” Trump wrote. “But we don’t want missiles shot at civilians, or American soldiers. Our patience is wearing thin.”

On Friday, an emergency diplomatic effort launched by European powers produced no signs of a breakthrough. Trump panned the effort, saying the talks in Geneva “didn’t help.” Iran has consistently refused U.S. and Israeli demands that it completely halt its enrichment of uranium, which can be used for both civilian nuclear power and, at higher enrichment levels, a nuclear weapon.

On June 10, Gen. Michael “Erik” Kurilla, who as the head of U.S. Central Command oversees military operations across the Middle East, told House lawmakers that he had presented Trump with a “wide range of options” when asked whether the United States was prepared to respond with overwhelming force to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon.

The most formidable of Iran’s nuclear sites is Fordow, which is buried about 250 feet underground in the side of a mountain near the holy city of Qom. U.S. and Israeli officials have said it can be disabled only by immense earth-penetrating bombs.

The only aircraft in the world capable of carrying such weapons, known as massive ordnance penetrators (MOPs), is the B-2 Spirit. Each MOP round weighs about 30,000 pounds, and defense officials had predicted that it would take multiple bombs to effectively attack Fordow.

The Fordow site, which Western intelligence agencies discovered and revealed publicly in 2009, has increased the pace of its enrichment of uranium to a 60% purity level, approaching the level needed for a nuclear weapon, according to a May 31 report from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Iran’s main uranium enrichment site is Natanz, which is larger but less deeply buried than Fordow. IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said Monday that Israeli airstrikes have destroyed the aboveground portion of the plant and knocked out the complex’s main power supply and backup systems.

Although Israel has not attacked the underground enrichment plant, “the loss of power to the cascade hall may have damaged the centrifuges there,” he said.

Reaction to the attack was mixed in Congress, including within the Republican Party, which for days has been split on whether to use military force and risk getting pulled into another Middle East conflict.

Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that Trump had “made a deliberate – and correct – decision to eliminate the existential threat posed by the Iranian regime.”

“We now have very serious choices ahead to provide security for our citizens and our allies and stability for the Middle East,” Wicker said.

Among the Republicans to condemn the strikes were Rep. Thomas Massie (Kentucky), who questioned whether the attack was constitutional, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Georgia).

“Every time America is on the verge of greatness, we get involved in another foreign war,” she posted on social media, adding that Israel is a nuclear armed nation and “this is not our fight.”

Sen. Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, lamented the decision, saying that the American people are “overwhelmingly opposed to the U.S. waging war on Iran.”

“Horrible judgment,” Kaine declared. “I will push for all Senators to vote on whether they are for this third idiotic Middle East war.”