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      Trump news at a glance: ‘Daddy’ Trump showered with praise on triumphant lap through Nato summit

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      On the back of hailing US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities as a “victory for everybody”, president Trump has claimed success at the Nato summit in The Hague, praising the commitment by Nato allies to boost defence spending to 5% of GDP.The US president described the summit as “a very historic milestone”. It was, he said, “something that no one really thought possible. And they said: ‘You did it, sir, you did it’. Well, I don’t know if I did it … but I think I did.”The US president also received sycophantic praise from Nato secretary general Mark Rutte who, referring to Trump’s foul mouthed outburst about Iran and Israel a day earlier, said rather remarkably: “Daddy sometimes has to use strong language”.Here are the key stories at a glance:Trump hails ‘big win’ as Nato raises defense spendingA relaxed Donald Trump said Nato’s decision to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP was a “big win” for western civilisation in a digressive press conference at a summit in The Hague where he reaffirmed the US’s commitment to the military alliance.Read the full storyTrump and Hegseth admit doubts about damage levels in IranDonald Trump and the US defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, have admitted to some doubt over the scale of the damage inflicted on Iran’s nuclear sites by the US bombing at the weekend, after a leaked Pentagon assessment said the Iranian programme had been set back by only a few months.Read the full storyVOA aired Trump’s message to Iran during US bombingsVoice of America (VOA) may have been used to broadcast Donald Trump’s message to Iranians in Farsi during weekend military strikes, the president’s senior adviser told Congress on Wednesday, revealing how the crumbling, traditionally independent news service is possibly functioning as a conduit for presidential messaging.Read the full storyBondi denies knowing Ice agents wear masks despite evidenceThe attorney general, Pam Bondi, professed ignorance of reports of immigration officials hiding their faces with masks during round-ups of undocumented people, despite widespread video evidence and reports that they are instilling pervasive fear and panic.Read the full storyCosta Rican court orders migrants deported by US to be freedA court in Costa Rica has ordered authorities to release foreign migrants who were locked up in a shelter after being deported by the US. About 200 people from Afghanistan, Iran, Russia as well as from Africa and some other Asian countries, including 80 children, were brought to the Central American nation in February under an agreement with the US administration of Donald Trump, a move criticized by human rights organizations.Read the full storyPlan to open California’s largest immigration jail sparks outragePlans to open a massive federal immigration processing center in a California desert community has sparked outrage among advocacy groups who argue it will come at a “long-term cost” and “fuel harm”.Read the full storyFirst meeting of new CDC vaccine panel reveals policy chaos sown by RFK JrThe first meeting of a critical federal vaccine panel was a high-profile display of how the US health secretary and vaccine skeptic Robert F Kennedy Jr has injected chaos into vaccine policy infrastructure.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Donald Trump and CBS could settle their legal battle over a contested interview with Kamala Harris for $20m as the dispute continues to shadow a major media merger.

      The New Jersey Democratic representative who is facing felony charges after a recent incident during a visit to an Ice detention facility pleaded not guilty in federal court.

      The vice-mayor of a small California city is under fire after appearing to call on street gangs to organize in the face of immigration sweeps by federal agents in Los Angeles.

      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 24 June 2025. More

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      Usha Vance: husband’s pick as Trump running mate came ‘like a bolt of lightning’

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      Usha Vance learned her husband, JD, had been selected to be Donald Trump’s running mate “maybe five minutes” before the news was made public – and just about an hour before he was formally nominated.“It really was like a bolt of lightning,” Vance said during an interview on Meghan McCain’s podcast, Citizen McCain. Nearly a year later, seated in the vice-president’s residence on the grounds of the US naval observatory, Vance reflected on how significantly her life has changed in ways big and small. “People call you ma’am,” she said. “No one’s ever called me ma’am before this.”Until last summer, Vance, the daughter of immigrants and a one-time Democrat, worked as a lawyer at a progressive law firm, raising her three young children in Ohio. Now, as second lady, she is escorted by Secret Service and can’t leave a gym class without being recognized in Washington.During the nearly hour-long interview, Vance was not asked to weigh in on the political or policy agenda of the Trump administration – the president’s decision to strike Iran, the immigration raids that have roiled her native California or the crackdown on colleges and law firms.Instead, Vance spoke about how the second couple is working to create a sense of normalcy for their three young children, and how she hopes to use her role to “make things just a little bit better for other people”. She talked about missing Ohio, trying to keep her kids off screens, her husband’s love for baking, and losing “that sense of being anonymous in public”.Asked about being a first – Vance is the nation’s first south Asian and Hindu second lady – she said it has “not been something that people are hyper-focused on”.“Maybe we’ve just sort of moved beyond trying to count firsts of everything,” she said, while also noting that many people have told her “how proud they are and how excited they are for this”.“That does give me a little bit of a sense of purpose,” she said.At the end of the interview, McCain, a former host of The View and daughter of the late Republican senator John McCain, raised what she called the “elephant in the room” and asked whether Vance had considered the prospect “that you could be our first lady in a few years”.“I’m not plotting out next steps or really trying for anything after this,” Vance said. “In a dream world, eventually, I’ll be able to live in my home and kind of continue my career and all those sorts of things. And if that happens in four years, I understand. If that happens at some other point in the future, I understand. [I’m] just sort of along for the ride and enjoying it while I can.”Vance so far refrained from choosing a single social cause or project to champion, as her predecessors have done, worried that the response would be to “attribute some kind of political motive or start to polarize around it”. Still, she offered a glimpse of the issues that she may want to focus on in her role. Her office is hosting the “Second Lady’s 2025 Summer Reading Challenge”, which she described as “the first of many small attempts” to encourage reading and help draw “children into the world of things and not of devices”.At one point in the conversation, McCain revealed that she was expecting a third child – a boy – and asked Vance to “share with me and women in America why having three kids is good”. Vance congratulated McCain warmly, and described how her children operated as a “pack”, playing together and taking care of each other. She assured McCain that the transition from two to three children was “shockingly, the easiest of all”. More

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      Trump DoJ ally denies claim he urged defying court orders on immigration

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      Emil Bove, a top justice department official and former defense attorney for Donald Trump, denied to senators on Wednesday a whistleblower’s claim that he suggested prosecutors ignore orders from judges who ruled against the president’s immigration policy.In a hearing before the Senate judiciary committee to consider his nomination to serve as a federal appeals court judge, Bove, currently the principal associate deputy attorney general at the justice department, also rejected assertions from Democrats that corruption charges against New York City mayor, Eric Adams, were dropped in order to secure his cooperation with the president’s immigration enforcement agenda.The hearing convened hours after reports emerged that former justice department attorney Erez Reuveni filed a whistleblower complaint, alleging that Bove said prosecutors “would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’” in instances when they rule against Trump’s immigration policies.“I have never advised a Department of Justice attorney to violate a court order,” Bove said in response to questions from the committee’s chair, Chuck Grassley.A former New York City-based federal prosecutor, Trump hired Bove as an attorney to defend him against the four state and federal indictments he faced before winning re-election last year. He then appointed Bove as acting justice department deputy attorney general his first weeks back in the White House, during which time he fired prosecutors who brought charges against January 6 rioters and requested a list of FBI agents who worked on the cases. He also oversaw legal motions to drop charges against Adams, which prompted the resignation of seven veteran prosecutors in New York who refused to cooperate.During his confirmation hearing for a seat on the appeals court overseeing New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and the US Virgin Islands, Republican lawmakers signaled no objections to moving his nomination to the Senate floor, while Bove described himself as unfairly maligned.“There is a wildly inaccurate caricature of me in the mainstream media,” Bove said in his opening remarks. “I am not anybody’s henchman. I’m not an enforcer. I’m a lawyer from a small town who never expected to be in an arena like this.”Democrats described Bove as exactly what he claims not to be, with the committee’s ranking member, Dick Durbin, saying he “led the effort to weaponize the Department of Justice against the president’s enemies. Having earned his stripes as a loyalist to this president, he’s been rewarded with this lifetime nomination.”Durbin went on to allege that ending Adams’s prosecution amounted to “a quid pro quo” arrangement in which a federal judge “foiled your plans” by ordering the charges dismissed with prejudice, meaning they could not be brought again.“In order to get Mayor Adams to cooperate with President Trump’s immigration policy, you were prepared to drop the charges against him?” Durbin asked.Bove, who showed little emotion in responding to Democrats’ skeptical questioning, replied: “That’s completely false.”Durbin demanded details of Bove’s decision to fire prosecutors who worked on January 6 case, noting that in a memo, he echoed Trump’s words in describing the prosecutions as “a grave national injustice”.“I did and continue to condemn unlawful behavior, particularly violence against law enforcement. At the same time, I condemn heavy handed and unnecessary tactics by prosecutors and agents. Both of those things I submit are characteristic of these events,” Bove said, adding that the prosecutors were fired because they were specifically tasked with working on January 6 cases.Asked if he condemned Trump’s decision to pardon all those who were convicted or prosecuted over the insurrection, Bove replied: “It’s not for me to question president Trump’s exercise of the pardon power any more than it would be for me to question president Biden’s commutation of death sentences or his pardons of drug traffickers.”Republicans often angled their questions toward standing up Trump’s claim that he faced unfair prosecutions by a justice department that had become “weaponized” under Biden. Senator John Kennedy asked Bove to detail a time he saw a justice department employee act “predominantly on the basis of his or her political beliefs”.Bove replied that he witnessed such conduct only while serving as a defense attorney for Trump, where he alleged that members of special counsel Jack Smith’s team took “positions about the need to go to trial quickly … that I found, in my experience, to be completely inconsistent with normal practice, which led me to draw in inferences of the nature that you’re suggesting”.None of the two federal indictments Smith secured against Trump went to trial prior to his election victory last November. More

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      Trump is angry with a world that won’t give him easy deals | Rafael Behr

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      It was as close as Donald Trump might get to a lucid statement of his governing doctrine. “I may do it. I may not do it,” the president said to reporters on the White House lawn. “Nobody knows what I’m going to do.”The question was about joining Israeli air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Days later, US bombers were on their way. Some expected it to happen. Others, including Keir Starmer, had gone on record to say they didn’t. No one had known. The unpredictability doctrine wouldn’t have been violated either way.It applies also in economic and domestic policy. Trump’s boast of inscrutability could have been made about tariff rates, or a decision to deploy marines against US citizens who defy his immigration agency.Volatile inconsistency is a trait of the presidential personality, but also a learned management technique. Keeping everyone around you guessing, lurching from charm to menaces, swapping and dropping favourites on a whim – these are methods of coercive control. They generate disorientation and vulnerability. People who are braced for sudden mood swings must hang on the leader’s every word, looking for cues, awaiting instruction. Individual agency is lost, dependency is induced. It is something cult leaders do.A method that works with a quasi-monarchical entourage is poorly suited to international affairs. Foreign leaders are not White House courtiers. They might seek the US president’s favour in trade or fear his military wrath, but always with competing national interests in the background. On the world stage, Trump will never feel the unalloyed devotion he gets from worshippers at a Maga rally, which is one reason why he hates to travel.That tension is palpable at this week’s Nato summit in The Hague. Trump makes no secret of his disdain for European democracies. He resents their reliance on the Pentagon for security. He is unconvinced that defending their continent, especially the corner of it under violent assault from Russia, is the US’s problem. The threat he briefly made in his first term to pull out of Nato if other members didn’t start paying their way still hangs over the alliance. European leaders must strive to keep Trump onside while contingency planning for the day he decides to abandon them.Matthew Whitaker, the US’s permanent representative at Nato, tried to be reassuring on that point at the summit, declaring that it “has never been more engaged”. But he also conceded ignorance of what Trump might actually do. “I don’t want … to claim to be able to read his mind and know what he’s going to say.”That is the doctrine: nobody knows. This forces Nato members into an awkward dance, performing for Trump’s benefit while also working around him. They want to impress him with their financial ambition, pledging to spend 5% of their national GDP on defence by 2035. But they know also not to expect any reciprocal commitment, or none that can be trusted.War in the Middle East ramps the uncertainty up to new heights. European leaders need to stay focused on Ukraine and the prospect of Russia turning its territorial aggression on some other portion of Nato’s eastern flank. Vladimir Putin sees no legitimacy in borders that were drawn by the collapse of the Soviet Union. He has also geared Russia’s economy, political apparatus and propaganda machinery to assume perpetual war with the west. One lesson from Ukraine’s plight is to assume that when Putin says he is going to fight, he means it. Another is that, while deterrence is expensive, it is cheaper than the war that comes when the Kremlin feels confidently undeterred.These calculations keep Europeans up at night, but not Trump. He doesn’t recognise Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine and would happily see the war end on terms that leave Nato humiliated and Putin emboldened, and signal an epoch-defining shift in the balance of global power away from democracy.But framing the choice in grand geostrategic terms obscures pettier motives, which are often the salient ones with Trump. He doesn’t want to take Kyiv’s side because that is what Joe Biden did. It isn’t his cause and so he thinks it is dumb.This is not the case with Iran. US allies are required, in public at least, to judge Trump’s military intervention as though it were made according to a conventional diplomatic and strategic calculus: the prospect of Tehran wielding powers of nuclear apocalypse is truly abhorrent; negotiation was not bearing fruit. Maybe there was reason to dispute US intelligence assessments that said the threshold of weapons-readiness was not imminent. Maybe the time to act really was at hand.But those are rationalising arguments, retrofitted to a choice that Trump made as much from vanity as any more sophisticated motive. He was bounced into war by Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli prime minister appears to have gamed the US president’s aversion to looking weak and his limitless appetite for glory. Early Israeli success – an extraordinary feat of military intelligence that took out senior Iranian commanders and assets – offered Trump the prospect of climbing aboard a winning operation and grabbing credit for victory.Hints that regime change was on the agenda may have prodded Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, towards a ceasefire on the basis that early capitulation with some power retained, while unpalatable, is preferable to assassination. Senior White House officials insisted the war aims were limited to containment of the nuclear threat, but since they hadn’t even known a war was coming their authority on the matter is questionable.Trump’s supporters say this is proof that his volatile style works. In strategic studies it is known as the “madman theory”. Discarding guardrails, looking ready to do something irrational, forces an enemy to choose caution. The obvious risk is that it also teaches the rest of the world the merit of madness. Iran’s rulers will be more convinced than ever that only nuclear weapons can guarantee their sovereignty. (That view would persist through regime change, since none of the viable scenarios result in a flowering of pro-western democracy in the region. Tehran’s atomic ambitions may be set back by years, but the cause of negotiated, multilateral non-proliferation is also in tatters.)That doesn’t interest Trump. He thinks in terms of easy wins, not complex consequences. Hence his palpable irritation with Israel and Iran for violating the ceasefire and generally not knowing “what the fuck they’re doing”. He is aware that he looks played by Netanyahu, much as he once showed a flicker of frustration with Putin for “tapping” him along in negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. He promised US voters deals. He gets cross when the world withholds them from him.This is a natural function of the unpredictability doctrine. Telling other countries they can never know what you’ll do makes them less responsive to diplomacy; less biddable to the whim of a US president. A vicious cycle then begins. Trump relies on his volatile persona to assert control in situations that he doesn’t understand, generating chaos that exposes his impotence, which in turn provokes him to tug in more arbitrary fury at his levers of power.For European democracies this is debilitating. It is hard to coordinate defence against external threats when the paramount power in your alliance is the origin of so much instability. But Nato leaders will get no respite from the uncertainty as long as Trump sits in the White House. The thing they most need from him – reliability – is the one thing he is destined by personality and doctrine never to provide.

      Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist More

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      Doge employee ‘Big Balls’ has resigned, says White House official

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      One of the US so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) service’s best-known employees, 19-year-old Edward Coristine, has resigned from the US government, a White House official said on Tuesday, a month after the acrimonious departure of his former boss Elon Musk.The White House official gave no further details on the move and Coristine did not immediately return an email seeking comment.Coristine worked at Musk’s brain connectivity company Neuralink before joining the tech billionaire as he led Doge established by the Trump administration earlier this year. Doge has overseen job cuts at almost every federal agency but is starting to see losses itself. Key Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, who was in charge of day-to-day running of Doge, has also left, along with others.The White House has said that Doge’s mission will continue.Coristine’s youth and online moniker “Big Balls” became a pop-culture meme as Doge swept through the US government, seizing data and firing employees en masse.Last month, Reuters reported that Coristine was one of two Doge associates promoting the use of AI across the federal bureaucracy. Media outlets, including Wired which first reported his departure, revealed that Coristine had been active in a chat room popular with hackers and previously had been fired from a job following an alleged data leak.In March, Reuters reported that Coristine had provided tech support to a cybercrime gang that had bragged about trafficking in stolen data and harassing an FBI agent.Beginning around 2022, while still in high school, Coristine ran a company called DiamondCDN that provided network services, according to corporate and digital records reviewed by Reuters and interviews with half a dozen former associates.Among its users was a website run by a ring of cybercriminals operating under the name “EGodly”, according to digital records preserved by the internet intelligence firm DomainTools and the online cybersecurity tool Any.Run.The digital records reviewed by Reuters showed the EGodly website, dataleak.fun, was tied to internet protocol addresses registered to DiamondCDN and other Coristine-owned entities between October 2022 and June 2023, and that some users attempting to access the site around that time would hit a DiamondCDN “security check”.In 2023, EGodly boasted on its Telegram channel of hijacking phone numbers, breaking into unspecified law enforcement email accounts in Latin America and Eastern Europe, and cryptocurrency theft.Early that year, the group distributed the personal details of an FBI agent who they said was investigating them, circulating his phone number, photographs of his house, and other private details on Telegram.EGodly also posted an audio recording of an obscene prank call made to the agent’s phone and a video, shot from the inside of a car, of an unknown party driving by the agent’s house in Wilmington, Delaware, at night and screaming out the window: “EGodly says you’re a bitch!“Reuters could not independently verify EGodly’s boasts of cybercriminal activity, including its claims to have hijacked phone numbers or infiltrated law enforcement emails. But it was able to authenticate the video by visiting the same Wilmington address and comparing the building to the one in the footage.The FBI agent targeted by EGodly, who is now retired, told Reuters that the group had drawn law enforcement attention because of its connection to swatting, the dangerous practice of making hoax emergency calls to send armed officers swarming targeted addresses. The agent didn’t go into detail. Reuters is not identifying him out of concern for further harassment.“These are bad folks,” the former agent said. “They’re not a pleasant group.” More

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      Trump news at a glance: profanity and push-back over success of Iran strikes

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      The US president’s shocking outburst at Iran and Israel capped a drama-filled 24 hours for Donald Trump, America, the Middle East and the world. As both sides defied his ceasefire, Trump lashed out, his anger and frustration clearly visible as he swore on live television. Trump later called Israel’s prime minister to demand he stop bombing Iran.With the fragile ceasefire seeming to hold, there was some unwelcome news via a report from the Pentagon, which said the US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities were not quite as successful as Trump had claimed.Here are the key stories at a glance:Trump lashes out at Israel and Iran over ceasefire violationsDonald Trump reacted furiously after an Israel-Iran ceasefire he brokered and took credit for was violated within a few hours.“Israel, as soon as we made the deal, they came out and they dropped a load of bombs, the likes of which I’ve never seen before, the biggest load that we’ve seen,” he said, in the strongest-worded public rebuke of Israel of any US president in history. “We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”Read the full storyUS strikes on Iran only set back nuclear program by months An initial classified US assessment of Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities over the weekend says they did not destroy two of the sites and likely only set back the nuclear program by a few months, according to two people familiar with the report.The report produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency – the intelligence arm of the Pentagon – concluded key components of the nuclear program including centrifuges were capable of being restarted within months.Read the full storyIce detentions surge for people with no criminal recordThe Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency is continuing to arrest an increasing number of immigrants without any criminal history, according to recent federal government data reviewed by the Guardian, demonstrating a further dramatic surge in this trend.The latest available data, released by Ice last Friday, appears to contradict Trump administration officials’ frequent assertions that the agency is prioritizing the pursuit of criminals in its immigration enforcement operations.Read the full storyPowell defends holding interest rates after fresh Trump attacksThe Federal Reserve is well placed to wait and see how tariffs affect US prices before cutting interest rates, its chair, Jerome Powell, insisted, defying renewed demands from Donald Trump. The US president has disregarded the central bank’s longstanding independence to repeatedly call for rate cuts to spur economic growth and launch a series of personal attacks on Powell.Read the full storyDoJ leader suggests defying courts over deportations – whistleblowerEmil Bove, the Department of Justice’s principal associate deputy attorney general, who Donald Trump nominated for the US court of appeals for the third circuit, reportedly said the department “would need to consider telling the courts ‘fuck you’” when it came to orders blocking the deportation of undocumented people.Read the full storyNew Yorkers vote in mayoral primaryNew Yorkers headed to the polls in a primary election that is both likely to decide the city’s next mayor and have major political implications for the future of the Democratic party.The race pits two drastically different Democrats against one another. Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old democratic socialist endorsed by the progressive wing of the Democratic party, is the main challenger to Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor who has been backed by the party’s centrists and billionaire donors.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Trump shared a private text message from Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, which said: “You are flying into another big success,” as he travelled to the Nato summit.

      A US marine veteran said he feels “betrayed” after immigration agents beat and arrested his father at his landscaping job.

      A jury awarded $500,000 to the widow of a police officer who killed himself nine days after he helped defend the US Capitol during the 2021 riot.

      The Trump administration will rescind protections that prevent logging on nearly a third of national forest lands, the US agriculture secretary announced.

      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 24 June 2025. More

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      US strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites only set back program by months, Pentagon report says

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      An initial classified US assessment of Donald Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities over the weekend says they did not destroy two of the sites and likely only set back the nuclear program by a few months, according to two people familiar with the report.The report produced by the Defense Intelligence Agency – the intelligence arm of the Pentagon – concluded key components of the nuclear program, including centrifuges, were capable of being restarted within months.The report also found that much of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium that could be put to use for a possible nuclear weapon was moved before the strikes and may have been moved to other secret nuclear sites maintained by Iran.The findings by the DIA, which were based on a preliminary battle damage assessment conducted by US Central Command, which oversees US military operations in the Middle East, suggests Trump’s declaration about the sites being “obliterated” may have been overstated.Trump said in his televised address on Saturday night immediately after the operation that the US had completely destroyed Iran’s enrichment sites at Natanz and Fordow, the facility buried deep underground, and at Isfahan, where enrichment was being stored.“The strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace,” Trump said in his address from the White House.While the DIA report was only an initial assessment, one of the people said if the intelligence on the ground was already finding within days that Fordow in particular was not destroyed, later assessments could suggest even less damage might have been inflicted.Long regarded as the most well-protected of Iran’s nuclear sites, the uranium-enrichment facilities at Fordow are buried beneath the Zagros mountains. Reports have suggested that the site was constructed beneath 45-90 metres (145-300ft) of bedrock, largely limestone and dolomite.The White House disputed the intelligence assessment, which was first reported by CNN. “The leaking of this alleged assessment is a clear attempt to demean President Trump, and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.The US vice-president, JD Vance, admitted on Sunday that Washington did not know where Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranian was, saying: “we are going to work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel”.Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Monday that the IAEA could no longer account for Iran’s stockpile of 400kg of uranium enriched to 60% purity.The Guardian revealed last Wednesday that top political appointees at the Pentagon had been briefed at the start of Trump’s second term that the 30,000lb “bunker buster” GBU-57 bombs meant to be used on Fordow would not completely destroy the facility.In that briefing, in January, officials were told by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency at the Pentagon that developed the GBU-57 that the bombs would not penetrate deep enough underground and only a tactical nuclear weapon would wipe out Fordow.The US strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities involved B2 bombers dropping 12 GBU-57s on Fordow and two GBU-57s on Natanz. A US navy submarine then launched roughly 30 Tomahawk missiles on Isfahan, US defense officials said at a news conference Sunday.Defense secretary Pete Hegseth repeated Trump’s claim at the news conference that the sites had been “obliterated”, but the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Gen Dan Caine, who helped oversee the operation, was more measured in his remarks.Caine said that all three of the nuclear sites had “sustained severe damage and destruction” but cautioned that the final battle-damage assessment for the military operation was still to come. More