U.S. officials detail Iran bombing raid, noting ‘limited’ attack for now

The massive U.S. attack launched overnight on Iran’s nuclear program was unprecedented in its scope and the weaponry used, but was intended as a limited strike and not to overthrow the Iranian government, top Trump administration officials said Sunday.

“Our view has been very clear that we don’t want a regime change. … We want to end their nuclear program, and then we want to talk to the Iranians about a long-term settlement,” Vice President JD Vance said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Vance’s remarks were echoed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in an early morning news conference with Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “This is most certainly not open-ended,” Hegseth said. “Anything can happen in conflict,” but “the scope of this was intentionally limited. That’s the message we’re sending.”

Initial intelligence gleaned after the strikes on three nuclear sites, Vance said, indicated “we have really pushed their program back by a very long time. I think that it’s going to be many, many years before the Iranians are able to develop a nuclear weapon.”

Although President Donald Trump said in a brief address to the nation Saturday night that the strikes had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, Caine said they were still waiting on a complete damage assessment. In addition to knowing whether the facilities were completely destroyed, it was as yet unclear if intelligence suggests Iran – as claimed by government officials in Tehran – had previously moved enrichment equipment or highly enriched uranium to other sites in advance of the attack.

As the Middle East, U.S. allies and lawmakers struggled to understand Trump’s reasoning for the timing of the attack on a nuclear weapons program his own intelligence agencies said was months, if not years, from developing a bomb, attention focused on the immediate aftermath of the strikes.

While U.S. officials warned that an Iranian response would bring an even more destructive U.S. assault, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, speaking at a news conference in Istanbul, said “all options” remain on the table for Tehran. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passageway and vital sea lane at the entrance to the Persian Gulf through which most of the region’s oil exports flow. A senior political official in Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militia said that “our military response is coming and in the first phase, we will target American forces in the Red Sea.”

Vance said that the administration’s expectation was “we’re going to learn a lot about what the Iranians want to do, how they want to proceed over the next 24 hours. … The president has said he wants now to engage in a diplomatic process. But if the Iranians are not going to play ball here” it won’t leave them with “many options in the future,” he said, echoing Trump’s threats from Saturday night that more strikes could be forthcoming.

The United States and Iran accused each other of diplomatic deception in the lead-up to the U.S. action. Trump, who said Thursday that he would give Iran up to two weeks to respond to his demand that Iran eliminate its uranium enrichment program, allowed just two days before the bombs fell. “Trump gave in to the demands of a criminal” and had “blown up” diplomacy, Araghchi said, a reference to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The strikes followed 10 days of Israeli attacks on Iran and pleas from Netanyahu for the U.S. to deliver a final blow to nuclear facilities buried deep underground that only U.S. aircraft carrying enormous “bunker-buster” bombs could reach.

“We didn’t blow up diplomacy,” Vance countered. “We felt very strongly that the Iranians were stonewalling us. They weren’t taking this seriously.”

“We had a limited window in which we could take out this Fordow nuclear facility,” he said, referring to Iran’s enrichment facility buried deep under a mountainside. “The president decided to take it … the diplomacy was never given a real chance by the Iranians.”

The U.S. airstrikes also hit the underground enrichment facility at Natanz and a storage facility for enriched uranium at Isfahan. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, both Fordow and Natanz have been used to enrich uranium to near weapons-grade levels.

“Of course we trust our intelligence community, but we also trust our instincts,” Vance said. “The real catalyst” for Trump’s decision, he said, was intelligence “that the Iranians stopped negotiating in good faith.” U.S-Iran talks over the country’s nuclear program began last April, but stalled on the question of whether Tehran would be allowed to continue uranium enrichment at low levels used for civil and research purposes.

The U.S. operation relied heavily on deception and secrecy. Numerous defense officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said they first learned of it Saturday evening in Washington either as it was being carried out or just afterward.

Aiding in the sleight of hand, the Pentagon deployed multiple B-2 Spirit stealth bombers west over the Pacific Ocean from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, raising the prospect that the U.S. might be preparing to strike Iran in coming days from an airfields in Guam or Diego Garcia, an Indian Ocean island.

At the same time, a separate fleet of B-2s took off just after midnight Saturday morning from Whiteman, about 50 miles from the outskirts of Kansas City, and flew stealthily to the east. Neither lawmakers, U.S. allies or the 40,000 American troops fanned out at bases across the Middle East were notified in advance.

Later Saturday morning, online flight trackers reported apparent aerial refueling of the westward flying bombers over the California coastline and off the coast of Hawaii. A U.S. official said Saturday that multiple B-2s were flying over the Pacific, in what was seen at the time as a show of force after Trump and his advisers said Thursday and Friday that they wanted to give diplomacy one last chance.

Caine, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, later called the flights over the Pacific a “decoy” and a “deception effort, known only to a small number of planners and key leaders in Washington and Tampa,” the home of U.S. Central Command, the top military headquarters overseeing operations in the Middle East. It was unclear how many of the Air Force fleet of 19 B-2 Spirits were sent on the decoy flights.

Seven B-2s, each armed with two 30,000-pound, bunker-busting Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs, flew 18 hours eastward and into Iranian airspace, accompanied by multiple fighter jets. At about 5 p.m. in Washington, the U.S. strikes on Iran began as a Navy submarine in the Middle East – Pentagon officials declined to say which one or where it was located – opened fire with about two dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles against “key infrastructure targets,” Caine said at the Sunday news conference.

While the Navy had assembled a fleet of warships in the region that included two aircraft carrier strike groups and numerous destroyers, the submarine had kept a lower profile, in keeping with its typically secret missions and locations.

At around 7:40 p.m. Washington time, around 2 a.m. in Iran, the B-2s and other “support aircraft” began launching airstrikes. Caine, a former fighter pilot, said fighter jets swept out in front of the bombers at high altitude and speed hunting for any potential enemy fighter jets or surface-to-air missile threats that could imperil the mission. It marked the first time the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP, bombs were used in combat.

All told, U.S. forces launched about 75 munitions at Iran during the operation – all without Iran responding, Caine said. “We are unaware of any shots fired at the package on the way out,” he said. “Iran’s fighters did not fly, and it appears that Iran’s surface-to-air missile systems did not see us throughout the mission. We retained the element of surprise.”

The B-2s, which refueled in the air multiple times on the Iran round-trip, were expected to land back at Whiteman later Sunday.