Trump's Attack on Iran Is a Huge Gamble

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The US attack on three Iranian nuclear sites was an astonishing operation, in terms of stealth, scale, tactics, and coordination. However, its consequences—whether the targets were destroyed and what Iran does in response—are, by nature, unknown.

In a televised speech Saturday night, President Donald Trump said the attack “completely and totally obliterated” Iran's nuclear program. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth repeated the claim at a Pentagon press conference Sunday morning. However, minutes later, standing just a few feet away from Hegseth, Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the attack was designed to “severely degrade” Iran's nuclear infrastructure. He also said that “BDA”—meaning bomb-damage assessment—“is still pending,” adding that “it's way too early to comment” on how much of Iran's nuclear infrastructure might have survived.

Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had threatened to retaliate with enormous force if the US joined Israel's war and attacked its nuclear targets, possibly against American military bases in the region. The US has some 40,000 military personnel stationed throughout the Middle East.

Trump warned Saturday night that, if Iran did surrender, the US would launch more attacks still and called on Tehran to negotiate for peace.

In other words, on a strategic level, the attack—which had been prepared for weeks, in case the president gave the Go signal—amounts to a huge gamble.

The targets were the uranium-enrichment plants at Fordo and Natanz, as well as a nuclear storage site at Isfahan. Natanz is somewhat underground and had been previously attacked, though only “damaged” by Israeli planes. Fordo is buried in a mountain—at least 300 feet deep—and could be destroyed, if at all, only by an American bomb , a 30,000-pound “bunker-buster” called the MOP, for Massive Ordnance Penetrator, which is too heavy to be carried by any plane except the American B-2 bomber.

According to US officials, seven B-2s dropped 14 MOPs—also known as GBU-57s—on Fordo and Natanz. (This was the first time the heavy weapon has ever been used in war.) Then submarines off the coast fired “more than two dozen” Tomahawk cruise missiles at Isfahan.

Hegseth said the B-2s took off from their base in Missouri and flew 18 hours to their targets, getting refueled several times by tanker aircraft along the way. As they entered Iranian airspace, they were escorted by fighter aircraft, to counter any effort to shoot down the bombers either by jet planes or surface-to-air-missiles.

In all, more than 125 US aircraft took part in the operation, some of them firing a total of 75 precision-guided weapons—either at the nuclear sites or, preemptively, at air-defense batteries on the ground. According to Hegseth and Caine, not a single plane was shot at , much less shot down.

Surprise was achieved, in part, through disappointment. On Friday, multiple news outlets noted, based on flight tracking data, that several B-2s had taken off from their bases and were flying west toward the Pacific. But Hegseth and Caine revealed that this was to mask the real operation—the 7 B-2s flying east toward Iran.

Democrats in Congress are protesting the attack, saying it violates the War Powers Act. Hegseth said at his press conference that congressional leaders were notified of the operation after the bombers were on their way, but that doesn't quite meet the law's reporting requirements. (The Act was passed in 1973, during the latter phases of the Vietnam War. It has rarely been observed by presidents or enforced by Congress in the decades since.)