President Donald Trump on Saturday said the “mass precision strikes” carried out by American bombers on a trio of Iranian nuclear facilities had been successful and warned that more of the same could be on the table if Tehran does not return to negotiations.
Speaking from the Cross Hall in the White House and flanked by Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio, the ex-Florida senator who serves as his national security adviser as well as Secretary of State, the president described the airstrikes as “a spectacular military success” and said the three facilities targeted by U.S. warplanes had been “completely and totally obliterated.”
“Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier,” he said.
Trump thanked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Israeli forces for the “wonderful job” they’ve done during a week-long campaign to take out much of Iran’s nuclear and military capabilities, and said the Israeli operation — along with tonight’s American airstrikes — had “gone a long way to erasing this horrible threat to Israel” from the Iranian nuclear program.
He also warned Tehran that their aggression in the region and their nuclear ambitions “cannot continue” and cautioned Iranian leaders not to retaliate.
“There will be either peace or there will be tragedy for Iran, far greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days. Remember, there are many targets left. Tonight's was the most difficult of them all, by far, and perhaps the most lethal. But if peace does not come quickly, we will go after those other targets with precision, speed and skill, most of them can be taken out in a matter of minutes,” he said.
The president’s remarks came just hours after he took to Truth Social to announce that U.S. forces had struck Iranian nuclear facilities in Natanz and Esfahan, as well as the Fordow enrichment facility hidden in a mountain near the city of Qom, ending days of speculation over whether he’d order American forces to join Israel’s week-old campaign to knock out Tehran’s nuclear weapons program with a surprise attack aimed at bringing Iranian officials back to the negotiating table.
The Natanz and Esfahan sites were hit by a salvo of 30 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles — cruise missiles with a range of at least 1,000 miles — fired from American submarines, while the Fordow site, which is located hundreds of feet underground, required as many as six 30,000 munitions known as Massive Ordnance Penetrators, which are referred to by the Air Force designation GBU-57A/B.
Those so-called bunker-buster bombs were designed specifically to attack and destroy hardened facilities such as Fordow, especially those that could house weapons of mass destruction.
The bombs used against Fordow were dropped from B-2 Spirit stealth bombers flying out of Whitman Air Force Base in Missouri.
Iranian officials have confirmed the attacks on all three facilities, with the missile strikes on Esfahan and Natanz facilities coming at approximately 2:30 am local time on Sunday. They did not describe the extent of any damage to the facilities, but the Tasnim news agency — an outlet affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps — said a spokesperson for the Emergency Committee of Qom acknowledged that “parts” of the Fordow facility had been “bombed.”
While Tehran has thus far refrained from targeting U.S. facilities or personnel during Israel’s week-long campaign, despite Israeli forces receiving a level of American defensive assistance, the surprise attack by American warplanes raises the possibility that Iran will react by going after American interests in the Middle East, or by activating proxy forces in the region or even going so far as to activate sleeper cells that could be present in or near the United States.
The attack on the Iranian facilities marks a significant departure from Trump’s vow not to launch what he has described as a “forever war” in the Middle East along the lines of the failed Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns launched in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington.
The president had been publicly vacillating on whether to authorize U.S. forces to enter the Iranian-Israeli conflict against Iran’s nuclear sites, and on Thursday he issued a statement through White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claiming he was giving Tehran “two weeks” to negotiate and avoid American involvement in the conflict by giving up its nuclear weapons program.
But The Independent understands that Trump’s public invitations for further talks between Tehran and Washington were a feint aimed at lulling Iranian officials into a false sense of security.
In fact, he had largely green-lit the attacks over the last two days based on U.S. and Israeli officials’ belief that only American weapons could be effective against the hardened Iranian facilities, particularly the Fordow facility on account of its underground location. He was also swayed in large part by Israel’s success at degrading Iran’s air defense and offensive missile capabilities, opening a hole for American warplanes and cruise missiles.
At the same time, he dismissed the official assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community, which has long maintained that Iran had not been actively building or seeking to build a nuclear weapon even as it spun up enrichment of uranium at levels not consistent with the country’s status as a non-nuclear weapons state.
On Friday, he claimed Tehran could produce a working weapon within “a matter of weeks” while offering no evidence, telling reporters the country had assembled a “tremendous amount” of nuclear material, which he said could permit the Islamic Republic to produce a working weapon “within a matter of weeks, or certainly within a matter of months.”
“We can’t let that happen,” he said.
The president returned to Washington on Saturday to oversee the operation from the White House Situation Room.
It’s unlikely that American involvement in the conflict will go beyond airstrikes despite Trump’s willingness to use some American capabilities to aid Israel’s effort to destroy Iran’s nuclear program, but Trump issued another warning to Tehran shortly after his televised remarks.
Writing on Truth Social in all capital letters, he said: “ANY RETALIATION BY IRAN AGAINST THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA WILL BE MET WITH FORCE FAR GREATER THAN WHAT WAS WITNESSED TONIGHT”
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