In the early hours of June 22, 2025, local time, the United States attacked three nuclear facilities in Iran with “bunker buster” bombs and Tomahawk missiles.
Following more than a week of Israeli strikes on various targets in Iran – which had prompted retaliatory strikes from Tehran – the U.S. move marks a possible inflection point in the conflict. In initial comments on the strikes at the Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz facilities, President Donald Trump said that Iran’s nuclear program had been “completely and fully obliterated.” In response, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the U.S. had “crossed a very big red line.”
The Conversation U.S. turned to Javed Ali, an expert on Middle East affairs at the University of Michigan and a former senior official at the National Security Council during the first Trump administration, to talk through why Trump chose now to act and what the potential repercussions could be.
What do we know about the nature and timing of US involvement?
President Trump has been forcefully hinting for days days that such a strike could happen, while at the same time opening up a window of negotiation by suggesting as late as June 20 that he would make a decision “within the next two weeks.” We know Trump can be very unpredictable, but he must have assessed that the current conditions presented an opportunity for U.S. action.
Trump met with the National Security Council twice in the days leading up to the strike. Typically at such meetings the president is presented with a menu of military options, which usually boil down to three: a narrow option, a middle ground and a “if you really want to go big” strike.
The one he picked, I would argue, is somewhere between the narrow option and the middle ground one.
The “go big” options would have been an attack on nuclear sites and Iranian leadership – be that senior members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, or possibly the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The more narrow approach would have been just one facility, likely to have been Fordo – a deeply fortified uranium enrichment site buried within a mountain.
What did occur was a strike there, but also at two other sites – Isfahan and Natanz.
U.S. military chiefs confirmed that that 12 GBU-57s – the so-called 30,000-pound bunker busters – were dropped by B-2 bombers on Fordo, and two on Isfahan.
That suggests to me that the military goal of the operation was to destroy Iran’s ability to produce and or store highly enriched uranium in a one-time strike rather than drag the U.S. into a more prolonged conflict.
Has the strike achieved Trump’s objectives?
It will take some time to properly assess the extent to which Iran’s ability to produce or store highly enriched uranium has been damaged.
Certainly we know that the bombs hit their targets,