Luana just sent me this tweet and although I thought it was a joke or spoof, it isn’t:
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 21, 2025
The United States dropped bombs on three nuclear sites in Iran on Saturday, President Trump announced, bringing the U.S. military directly into Israel’s war with Iran after days of uncertainty about whether he would intervene in the conflict.
“All planes are now outside of Iran air space,” he said in a social media post on Saturday night, adding that a “full payload” of bombs had been dropped on Fordo. “All planes are safely on their way home.”
The three sites that Mr. Trump said were hit on Saturday night included Iran’s two major uranium enrichment centers the mountain facility at Fordo and a larger enrichment plant at Natanz, which Israel struck several days ago with smaller weapons. The third site, near the ancient city of Isfahan, is where Iran is believed to keep its near-bomb-grade enriched uranium, which inspectors saw just two weeks ago.
Iran maintains its nuclear program is for civilian purposes, but Israel regards Iran’s potential for developing a nuclear weapon as a threat to its survival.
Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar, said on Saturday that Israel’s bombing campaign had pushed Iran two or three years back from the capability to make a nuclear weapon. Still, Israel has yet to fully destroy some of the most significant nuclear enrichment sites, chief among them Fordo.
Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said Iran would not reduce nuclear activities to zero “under any circumstances,” rejecting a U.S. demand, according to Mehr news agency, which is affiliated with the Iranian government. Iran, he said, was “ready to talk and cooperate” but he warned it would continue its military retaliation against Israel.
The Washington Post adds this:
President Donald Trump will address the nation at 10 p.m. Eastern time from the White House about the U.S. military operation in Iran.
This of course means war, and none of us knows what will happen now. Beyond the obvious questions: Was Fordo destroyed? Will Iran now negotiate? If so, will it agree to stop making a bomb, with stringent inspection? Will the regime fall?, there are other questions. How did the bombers get to Iran if they were in the Pacific? No Arab country I know of, including ones like Saudi Arabia where we have bases, said they would allow U.S. planes over their airspace? And did they drop enough bunker busters to get all the way into the centrifuge rooms at Fordo? How will Iran retaliate against the U.S.?
We seem to be in a war, and one not declared by Congress. The only thing I can predict with some accuracy is that a lot of young people will suddenly take the side of Iran.
Thank you and luana for the heads up. I had heard that B2’s were heading west from guam i think this sfternoon…reported.
This hit my inbox before any news alert from NYT or Wa Po.
I read Trump’s text. The question I have is whether the U.S. actually used the B2 bombers and bunker-buster bombs to execute the mission. I am assuming that this is the case, but Trump wasn’t explicit.
The fact that he’s now calling for peace tells me that he is not seeking regime change.
President Trump is speaking to the nation at 7:00 PM EDT.
Correction: Trump expected to speak at 10:00 PM EDT, not what I said above. Apologies.
I just read that the B-2s are capable of in-flight refueling, and flew from Missouri to Kosovo without landing. I guess they flew from the Pacific to Iran across Asia with refueling. We will know tomorrow.
Also, the WaPo adds this:
I read that in-flight fuel tankers were housed at Guam, but I don’t know if they were used to refuel the B2s.
The B2s have been at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean for a while now.
https://www.jpost.com/international/article-858138
I didn’t believe Trump when he said that he was going to wait a fortnight before making a decision, and thought this action was imminent when it was reported earlier that B2s had been repositioned. We just have to cross our fingers and hope that the missions were successful.
“Cross our fingers” is very poor military or political advice, right? No disparagement to you or your phrase choice, I also feel this is a cross your fingers situation, and the stakes seem very high for that kind of uncertainty. I’m with Edwin Starr on this one, at least as it concerns America’s involvement. When has our (or any other Western country’s) involvement in the Middle East turned out well? Why is this different? Maybe that’s the question I need to ponder.
Every once in a while the Very Stable Genius does the right thing. Kinda like Hitler making the trains run on time. If this helps bring nearer the day the horrific theocracy occupying Iran is no more, that will be a Very Good Thing. As Sam Harris pointed out (and was deliberately quote mined about “proving” he was an Islamophobe), a nuclear armed Iran would very likely lead to a nuclear first strike against Iran by the US with all the horrendous death and suffering it would entail for the already long-suffering Iranians, so taking out that immediate threat and taking out the IRGC and the Ayatollah will save countless Iranian and Israeli and American lives.
Way too early to assume any of the optimism you espouse, but what do I know and I hope you’re correct. I just don’t have your hope that this will work out the way anyone hopes it will. Too many variables, Religion is a huge factor in this for one, and of course the “unknown knowns of unknowing knowledge of the unknows after the knowns were known”…sorry, dumb Rumsfeld world-salad rehash, but I’m sure you understand the gist.
Right, too early.
Maybe nationalism more than religion. Many people who hate the ayatollah will work together for their nation, under attack. If the bombing works it will delay progress towards the atom bomb, but I would bet that it strengthens the regime.
I agree with you. This looks like a replay of the lead-up to the second Iraq war, and I think the aftermath will be similar. It is an appealing short-term solution with no end game.
The nuclear weapons argument is similar to the “weapons of mass destruction”argument given to get people excited about an attack on Iraq. Netanyahu has been making the argument that Iran is within months or weeks of having nuclear weapons. He has been saying that since the 1990s, always just months or weeks away.
On a lighter note, John Stewart’s daily program has collected some clips of these Netanyahu warnings, including a Colin Powell-like speech in front of the UN. Look up “Jon Stewart on Israel’s “Urgent” Iran Strike, Minnesota Murders & MAGA’s Blame Game | The Daily Show”
See 7:27 for the beginning of the Netanyahu segment.
I do see that there is an important difference between the Iraq and Iran situations. There is no doubt that Iran is really trying to make nuclear weapons. So I can understand how this attack, if restricted to nuclear sites, could be justified. Unfortunately, Israel has now openly stated that one of their goals is to displace the population of Tehran, and Trump ordered its civilians to evacuate. I’m pretty sure this war is really not about nukes but about forced regime change. I can see that even this might be justified, in the short term, because of Iran’s role in regional terrorism. But it will also sow more hatred of Israel and the West, and marginalize Iran’s progressives. I wonder how this will end. I hope those who are cheering now will be right. But I would bet that this war will make things much worse than they are today. I hope I am wrong.
The only thing we know for sure is: if successful, it is due our current President’s courage, foresight, steely resolve, etc. If unsuccessful, blame will be on everyone else.
Since people are asking about the B2, I’ve posted the Air Force fact sheet below.
https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/104482/b-2-spirit/
If this finally stops Iran (a terrorist theocracy) from any longer perusing a nuclear weapon, then I am for it. Hopefully no civilians were killed.
They attacked production sites for nuclear materials, not nuclear silos. Of course civilians were killed, in much the same way that a Moon Nazi strike on Los Alamos and Oak Ridge in 1944 would’ve bagged rather a lot of civilians.
I won’t be shedding a single tear for any civilians who were killed.
These are educated people of science – people who should know better! – who willingly contributed their energies and expertise in a disgusting and unethical effort to eradicate men, women, and children based solely on their different religion and ethnicity. They knew the risks and chose to commit evil.
This gloating over death bothers me. You don’t know them. They may very well have had the same motivations as our own physicists who work on weaponry. I know several of those US physicists, and most of them think that these weapons keep the US safe from foreign aggression. I expect many of the Iranian physicists have similar motivations.
I also taught physics to Iranian undergraduates who had fled to the US right after the Islamic revolution. I know from them how bad things were/are in Iran. But many Iranians are exceptionally kind, cultured, and intelligent humans. The same is true of the Israeli soldiers who think they are protecting their own country, and who are often demonized for it. If you don’t know them, no one should be gloating over their deaths, on either side.
Munitions workers even if coerced are legitimate targets in war. So are people who build Diesel engines, even if some of those engines go into farm tractors or keeping the incubators running in a neonatal ICU. So are people who build radar sets, even if the radar is only to defend the Nation against air attack. The only test is if the military objective, in the judgment of the attacker, is valuable enough to justify the expected civilian casualties. Bomb manufacturing clearly passes that test.
It’s possible that Iran, expecting attack soon, put a temporary hold on enrichment and evacuated the civilian workers and scientists from the underground complex to prevent their being buried alive and lost to the longer effort. It wasn’t like the Germans needing every drop of synthetic gasoline they could make every day to keep their war machine moving. Heavy casualties resulted from wartime attacks on urban industrial targets because even in clear daylight with then-sophisticated bomb sights, the vast majority of bombs missed the aiming point. If it turns out that no civilians were killed at Fordow, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the facilities were empty of workers. At the top end (the scientists) are extremely hard to replace – very unexpendable as Israel has taught us by whacking them – but even the lower order tech people would be hard to replace/retrain.
With their underground factories in tatters (fingers crossed) the I.R.I. will still want nukes and protecting the workers in this fraught time would be paramount.
D.A.
NYC
Perhaps of interest here: Many have said that US involvement was need to destroy the Fordow complex, because nobody else can fly bombs as big as the GBU-57 at 30,000lbs. But I’ve seen very little attempt to figure out whether this is possible at all, except here:
https://x.com/hsu_steve/status/1936389270341582959
tl;dr is that estimating how far a bomb penetrates earth is fairly well understood, 100m of clay is plausible, but probably less than 10m of hard rock. If the site really is beneath 100m of granite, then these bombs can put some rubble in the access roads, and little more. The builders were not idiots, and had access to this research.
If you know of better analysis, pleas post a link.
I assume they’re meant to function like Barnes Wallis’s 10-ton Grand Slam bombs dropped by the RAF in WW2, i.e. their sheer mass is enough to bury themselves sufficiently before exploding that their effect is mainly made through earth movement rather than through an explosion per se. They destroyed deeply buried and heavily shielded German installations by creating what were in effect highly localized earthquakes. Anyone unlucky enough to be in those installations was not blown to smithereens but entombed in the rubble.
If I remember right, most of those were in soft ground. And the primary effect was more excavating a large cavity (ideally under bridge foundations, etc), than shaking the earth? On submarine pens, exploding inside the concrete roof caused localized collapse, but people elsewhere in the building survived:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Slam_(bomb)#Farge,_27_March
We have some photos now of Fordow, and they do not show large surface craters. Which seems to me to indicate that the bombs got at least fairly deep. How much damage they did (and how much equipment / material was still present a the time)… it may take a while for much to become public.
Even if the bombs didn’t penetrate all the way to the production area, they’ve most likely made access to it impossible in the short term. In the longer term, I’d imagine that getting thru massively unstable, fractured stone is much more difficult than getting thru virgin rock. Would it even be viable to try?
I enjoy this back and forth gentlemen – about the dynamics of the bombing.
I feel that there are just too many variables here – both known and unknown (“unknown unknowns” as Rummy put it).
We’ll find out more when – probably via signals intel or spies – what the damage is from Israel, what the Iranian bigs are telling each other.
And even then only what the Israelis want us to know.
Which is frustrating! I have so many questions!
D.A.
NYC
Well, if Trump was gonna bomb Iran, this was pretty much the way to do it: in complete secrecy. Last I heard of him, he was saying “we’ll wait two weeks”. Obviously he didn’t wait, and that was a distraction.
There was an accusation earlier on that even the earlier negotiations were a distraction, to give Israel time to prepare their operation, which I personally didn’t believe. Maybe I was wrong.
HA! I thought that was wonderful. “Two weeks” from Trump usually means forgetaboutit.
I took it as that.
D.A.
NYC
Mark R. above asks: “When has our (or any other Western country’s) involvement in the Middle East turned out well?”
The ejection of Saddam Hussein from his invasion of Kuwait did not end so badly. Iraqi Kurds, for one group, do not mourn the Western overthrow of Saddam in Iraq. Earlier, there are both plus and minus points for the ejection of the Ottoman Empire.
So the answers to the question are not simple.
Wow! He deserves Nobel peace prize. Seriously.
Man, I have been optimistically anticipating and advocating for this day for at least five to ten years, and it has finally arrived. This is not a day for doom and gloom – it is a day for celebration!
Nuclear weapons in the hands of Jihadi extremists bent on genocide has sustained the B-movie industry for decades but let us not forget for a second that such a tortured script is not fiction, but based in all-too-real actuality. Finally, someone at the helm had enough courage to do something about it. There is a lot to dislike about Donald Trump, but I salute him for this action, which is likely the defining moment of his Presidency.
My thoughts exactly. President Trump has done the whole world a great service.
Even if the Fordow complex has not been fatally breached, yet, — we simply don’t know at this point — the Iranian leaders now know the United States will do it, can do it, and believes it must do it. I hope all Canadians recognize this.
Perhaps Iran will at least now have more to be concerned with than blinding women for not wearing a headscarf.
+10 billion gazillion
I’m quite depressed by the comments here. The USA is the only country to have used nuclear weapons for the massacre of two civilian populations (but of course that was justified to save US deaths). So in order to prevent “Jihadi extremists bent on genocide” from using a hypothetical bomb that they are not close to producing, for hypothetical purposes – what, render the water from the River Jordan radioactive and undrinkable in a region notoriously short of water? – the US gets to drop bombs on a country with which it is not at war?
And Leslie, seriously, “President Trump has done the whole world a great service.”?
I came for the support of our host for NZ science, for which much thanks, but I’m out of sympathy with much of the content here now, so I’m out, but so long, and thanks for all the ducks.
The Jordan River is at least 870 miles from the nearest Iranian nuclear enrichment facility. No idea why that concerns you.
Best available data is that Iran possesses over 400 kg of uranium enriched to 60% purity, sufficient for approximately 10 nuclear weapons if further enriched to weapons-grade levels (90%). This could be done in two weeks, as Iran still has stockpiles of centrifuges. We don’t know where Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium is located.
Assuming you are from NZ, as you are here for NZ science, please realize that you characterized an Iranian nuclear bomb as “hypothetical” twice. No doubt it is an abstract concept for you, sitting safely on the opposite side of the planet, with no Iranian crosshairs trained on your country. NZ is not characterized as “Satan” by the Mullahs. NZ has not had hundreds of its soldiers killed by an Iranian bomb plot, or two of its embassies attacked by Iran with 63 people killed. NZ likely does not have Iranian sleeper cells embedded within it, hatching murder plots.
NZ has not had Iranian ballistic missiles and explosive drones rained down upon it. You have not had Iranian proxies fire more than 20,000 rockets at you, build 450 miles of murder tunnels under your earth, or had balloons drop down on your fields laden with explosives disguised as gifts to murder your children. NZ has not had “Jihadi extremists bent on genocide” murdering its citizens for over 100 years. But Israel has. That’s factual, not hypothetical.
Iran armed with nuclear bombs is an absolute and immediate existential threat to Israel and the United States. That’s the ugly reality of the situation. Glad you appreciate the cute ducks.
I went WTF? over the Jordan River thing myself. What I decided Andrew probably meant was that Iran would never launch nuclear weapons at Israel because this would contaminate the Jordan River/Dead Sea basin which has no outflow to anywhere else. As if Iran would care about that. I took this as one of those idiosyncratic New Zealander views on atomic energy.
But whatever, yes I was serious.
My only other comment is about Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “calling wolf” for 30 years about Iran’s nuclear ambitions. To the extent that his calls have imposed slowdowns, pauses, and setbacks in Iran’s efforts, it’s not surprising that it’s been going on for a long time. (I don’t know enough about Israeli politics to know if I should have prefaced that with, “I’m no fan of Benjamin Netanyahu but . . .”) And here we are with uranium enriched to 60%. (Exactly like paying off your mortgage, the less principle you have still outstanding, the faster your equity builds up.) We don’t know if Iran is working in parallel on the other technology necessary to make an implosion-fissionable warhead deliverable with the ballistic missiles Iran has or can produce. That’s a tall order. With any luck, the US Air Force just made the order taller.
The target of an Iranian bomb would clearly be Tel Aviv, not the Jordan valley and obviously not Jerusalem, since they won’t want to go down among their fellow religionists as the regime that destroyed the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in Islam. And yes, having for decades loudly proclaimed their determination to “wipe Israel off the map” (a goal the Israelis have never reciprocated), their long history of indifference to mass casualties (from the human waves sent to clear minefields in the Iran-Iraq war onwards), and their generally apocalyptic world view, the threat to Israel is very, very much more than hypothetical.
My suspicion is that everyone is overthinking this. From what I’ve heard about Trump, thinking and assessing outcomes is alien to him. Everything is about HIM! He’s done this as a response to those who had the audacity to call him Taco.