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      Pentagon Details Multipronged Attack on Iranian Nuclear Sites

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      B-2 stealth bombers, fighter aircraft and submarine-launched cruise missiles struck Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan during “Operation Midnight Hammer.”Senior Pentagon officials on Sunday described an extraordinary coordinated military operation targeting Iran that took place under utmost secrecy and showcased what the American military was capable of when it put in place its doctrine of using air and naval forces to strike an adversary.But neither Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth nor Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, could immediately say whether Iran still retained the ability to make a nuclear weapon. Mr. Hegseth repeated President Trump’s assertion from the previous night that the nuclear sites had been “obliterated.” General Caine did not.The final battle damage assessment for the military operation against Iran, General Caine said, was still to come. He said the initial assessment showed that all three of the Iranian nuclear sites that were struck “sustained severe damage and destruction.”Mr. Hegseth and General Caine, appearing before reporters in the Pentagon’s briefing room for the first time since they took office, described an intricate operation that began at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, home to the B-2 stealth bombers used in the strikes, and hit three nuclear sites in a span of less than a half-hour — 6:40 p.m. to 7:05 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday.The bombers took off in secrecy on Friday night from Missouri for the more than 7,000-mile trip, which involved multiple refuelings. They crossed the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea to reach the skies above Iran, where they struck the heavily fortified nuclear site at Fordo, as well as facilities at Natanz.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Will Iran Decide to Retaliate Against the U.S.?

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      The Supreme Leader may choose to back down after a first round of retaliation, or prefer martyrdom and building a nuclear weapon.In July 1988, faced with bleak prospects in its war with an American-backed Iraq, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, decided reluctantly to accept a cease-fire and end the conflict.“It’s like drinking from a chalice of poison,” he told Iranians. But the survival of the young Islamic Republic depended on swallowing.His successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, now faces a similar decision. But having led the country since 1989 and rebuilt it as a regional and nuclear power, it is by no means clear that he will make the same choice.At 86, with much of his life’s work in ruins around him, he may prefer martyrdom to the surrender that President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel are demanding of him.Iran’s first response was defiant. “The Islamic Republic of Iran is resolved to defend Iran’s territory, sovereignty, security and people by all force and means against the United States’ criminal aggression,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.Iran has already launched a serious barrage of missiles on Israel. It may, as it has warned, attack some of the 40,000 American soldiers in the region.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Military Is Pulled Back Into Middle East Wars

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      The strikes on Iran ushered in a period of high alert as the Pentagon braced for almost-certain retaliation against American forces in the region.The U.S. strikes on nuclear sites in Iran are an extraordinary turn for a military that was supposed to be moving on from two decades of forever wars in the Middle East, and they put the United States back on war footing.Across the region, where more than 40,000 American troops are on bases and warships, the strikes ushered in a period of high alert as the Pentagon braced for almost-certain retaliation from Iran.President Trump announced on social media that three Iranian sites were hit, including the mountain facility at Fordo. The bombs used in the strikes are believed to include “bunker busters,” which are designed to destroy deep underground bunkers or well-buried weapons in highly protected facilities.A U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence said that multiple 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs were dropped on Fordo, and that initial damage assessments indicated that the facility had been “taken off the table.”The strikes, whether successful or not, are likely to trigger a fierce response. Tehran has vowed to strike at American bases in the Middle East, and American intelligence agencies confirmed before the strikes took place that Iran would take steps to widen the war and hit U.S. forces in the region. U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence, said the strikes against the three nuclear sites were complete. The official said no follow-up attacks were expected, although commanders were ready to respond to any Iranian retaliation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      No U.S. Decision on Joining War Yet, Though It Could Come in Days, Israeli Officials Say

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      Israel on Saturday struck sites in southwestern Iran that would most likely be on any potential flight path used by U.S. warplanes on the way to attack a key Iranian nuclear facility.The Trump administration has not told the Israeli military whether the United States plans to join the war on Iran, two Israeli defense officials said on Saturday.But the two officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss security matters, said they believed that Washington was likely to enter the war and that it was already making preparations to do so.Based on Israeli conversations with their American counterparts over the past two days, the officials said, a U.S. strike on Iran could take place in the coming days.President Trump was scheduled to meet with his national security team at the White House on Saturday evening to discuss the possibility of joining Israel’s attacks on Iranian nuclear sites. While the White House has said Mr. Trump has not made a final decision on an attack, the United States has dispatched several Air Force B-2 bombers from an American base and across the Pacific.The bombers can carry the 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs Mr. Trump is considering dropping on Fordo, the heavily fortified underground nuclear facility in Iran that is critical to its nuclear program.The planes could provide options to the president, even if they are not ultimately deployed. In moving the B-2 bombers — and allowing the public to know about it — the White House may also be seeking to pressure Iran to come to the negotiating table.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Buys Himself Time, and Opens Up Some New Options

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      While President Trump appears to be offering one more off ramp to the Iranians, he also is bolstering his own military options.President Trump’s sudden announcement that he could take up to two weeks to decide whether to plunge the United States into the heart of the Israel-Iran conflict is being advertised by the White House as giving diplomacy one more chance to work.But it also opens a host of new military and covert options.Assuming he makes full use of it, Mr. Trump will now have time to determine whether six days of relentless bombing and killing by Israeli forces — which has taken out one of Iran’s two biggest uranium enrichment centers, much of its missile fleet and its most senior officers and nuclear scientists — has changed minds in Tehran.The deal that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rejected earlier this month, which would have cut off Iran’s main pathway to a bomb by eventually ending enrichment on Iranian soil, may look very different now that one of its largest nuclear centers has been badly damaged and the president is openly considering dropping the world’s largest conventional weapon on the second. Or, it may simply harden the Iranians’ resolve not to give in.It is also possible, some experts noted, that Mr. Trump’s announcement on Thursday was an effort to deceive the Iranians and get them to let their guard down.“That could be cover for a decision to strike, immediately,” James G. Stavridis, a retired Navy admiral and the former supreme U.S. commander in Europe, said on CNN. “Maybe this is a very clever ruse to lull the Iranians into a sense of complacency.”Even if there is no deception involved, by offering one more off-ramp to the Iranians, Mr. Trump will also be bolstering his own military options. Two weeks allows time for a second American aircraft carrier to get into place, giving U.S. forces a better chance to counter the inevitable Iranian retaliation, with whatever part of their missile fleet is still usable. It would give Israel more time to destroy the air defenses around the Fordo enrichment site and other nuclear targets, mitigating the risks to U.S. forces if Mr. Trump ultimately decided to attack.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Spy Agencies Assess Iran Remains Undecided on Building a Bomb

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      U.S. intelligence officials said Iran was likely to pivot toward producing a nuclear weapon if the U.S. attacked a main uranium enrichment site, or if Israel killed its supreme leader.U.S. intelligence agencies continue to believe that Iran has yet to decide whether to make a nuclear bomb even though it has developed a large stockpile of the enriched uranium necessary for it to do so, according to intelligence and other American officials.That assessment has not changed since the intelligence agencies last addressed the question of Iran’s intentions in March, the officials said, even as Israel has attacked Iranian nuclear facilities.Senior U.S. intelligence officials said that Iranian leaders were likely to shift toward producing a bomb if the American military attacked the Iranian uranium enrichment site Fordo or if Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader.The question of whether Iran has decided to complete the work of building a bomb is irrelevant in the eyes of many Iran hawks in the United States and Israel, who say Tehran is close enough to represent an existential danger to Israel. But it has long been a flashpoint in the debate over policy toward Iran and has flared again as President Trump weighs whether to bomb Fordo.White House officials held an intelligence briefing on Thursday and announced that Mr. Trump would make his decision within the next two weeks.At the White House meeting, John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, told officials that Iran was very close to having a nuclear weapon.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      An Iran Strategy for Trump

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      Nobody, perhaps even President Trump himself, knows for sure whether the United States will wind up joining Israel in launching military strikes on Iran. “I may do it, I may not do it,” he said on Wednesday. But with a third U.S. aircraft carrier on its way to the region and the president calling for Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” the chance of war seems higher than ever — particularly now that Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has gruffly rebuffed Trump’s demand.If the U.S. does attack, the most obvious target will be the Fordo nuclear site, a deeply buried facility where Iran enriches uranium and which, by most reports, can be knocked out only by a 15-ton bomb known as a Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP. Less well known but surely on the U.S. target list is a new, still unfinished subterranean facility south of Iran’s main (and now largely destroyed) enrichment plant at Natanz. American pilots would also almost certainly join their Israeli counterparts in attacking Iranian ballistic missile launchers and bases.And then what? Nobody doubts the U.S. can do a lot of damage to Iran’s nuclear capabilities, at least in the short term. What comes afterward is harder to predict.Proponents of an American strike believe that we have no realistic choice other than to help Israel do as thorough a job as possible in setting back Iran’s nuclear ambitions not just for months but years — more than enough time to allow benign forces to shape events, including the possibility of Iranians overthrowing their widely detested rulers.By contrast, skeptics fear that the lessons Iran’s leaders will draw from an American attack is that they should have gotten a bomb much sooner — and that the appropriate response to such an attack is to be more repressive at home and less receptive to diplomatic overtures from abroad. Skeptics also expect that Iran will respond to an attack by ramping up its malign regional activities, not least to embroil the U.S. in another Middle East war the Trump administration desperately wants to avoid.I’m with the proponents. A nuclear-armed Iran, fielding missiles of ever-growing reach, is both an unacceptable threat to U.S. security and a consequential failure of U.S. deterrence. After years of Iran’s prevarications, which led even the Biden administration to give up on diplomacy, to say nothing of Iran’s cheating on its legal commitments — detailed last month in a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency — the world had run out of plausible nonmilitary options to prevent the regime from going nuclear.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump, Iran and the Specter of Iraq: ‘We Bought All the Happy Talk’

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      President Trump is pondering swift military action in Iran. There were similar expectations that the war in Iraq would be quick and triumphant.A little more than 22 years ago, Washington was on edge as a president stood on the precipice of ordering an invasion of Baghdad. The expectation was that it would be a quick, triumphant “mission accomplished.”By the time the United States withdrew nearly nine years and more than 4,000 American and 100,000 Iraqi deaths later, the war had become a historic lesson of miscalculation and unintended consequences.The specter of Iraq now hangs over a deeply divided, anxious Washington. President Trump, who campaigned against America’s “forever wars,” is pondering a swift deployment of American military might in Iran. This time there are not some 200,000 American troops massed in the Middle East, or antiwar demonstrations around the world. But the sense of dread and the unknown feels in many ways the same.“So much of this is the same story told again,” said Vali R. Nasr, an Iranian American who is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Once upon a time we didn’t know better, and we bought all the happy talk about Iraq. But every single assumption proved wrong.”There are many similarities. The Bush administration and its allies saw the invasion of Iraq as a “cakewalk” and promised that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators. There were internal disputes over the intelligence that justified the war. A phalanx of neoconservatives pushed hard for the chance to get rid of Saddam Hussein, the longtime dictator of Iraq. And America held its breath waiting for President George W. Bush to announce a final decision.Today Trump allies argue that coming to the aid of Israel by dropping 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on Fordo, Iran’s most fortified nuclear site, could be a one-off event that would transform the Middle East. There is a dispute over intelligence between Tulsi Gabbard, Mr. Trump’s director of national intelligence, who said in March that Iran was not actively building a nuclear weapon, and Mr. Trump, who retorted on Tuesday that “I don’t care what she said.” Iran, he added, was in fact close to a nuclear weapon. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More