The United States struck three key nuclear sites in Iran early on Sunday, injecting itself into Israel’s war with Iran in a sophisticated mission and prompting fears of military escalation in the Middle East amid Israel’s brutal onslaught of Gaza.
In a televised address early on Sunday, US President Donald Trump justified the strikes, saying they were aimed at stopping “the nuclear threat” posed by Iran. Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordow sites, which are involved in the production or storage of enriched uranium, were targeted.
“Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated,” he said, warning Tehran against retaliation.
Israel and Trump claim that Iran can use the enriched uranium to make atomic warheads. But Iran insists its nuclear programme is solely for civilian purposes. The United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has also rejected Israeli claims that Iran was on the verge of making nuclear weapons.
Condemning the strikes, which US officials said were highly coordinated, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that the time for diplomacy had passed and that his country had the right to defend itself.
“The warmongering, a lawless administration in Washington, is solely and fully responsible for the dangerous consequences and far-reaching implications of its act of aggression,” he said at a news conference in Istanbul, Turkiye.
Iranian officials, meanwhile, have not detailed the extent of the damage and have attempted to downplay the significance of the hits. Speaking on state TV, Hassan Abedini, the deputy political director of Iran’s state broadcaster, said the three nuclear sites had been evacuated “a while ago” and that they “didn’t suffer a major blow because the materials had already been taken out”.
Here’s what to know about the nuclear plants hit and what the attacks mean for Iran:
Which facilities were hit?
Trump on Sunday said a full payload of bombs “obliterated” Iran’s Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan nuclear sites. Iranian officials, according to the Reuters news agency, also confirmed that the three facilities were hit.
- Fordow is an underground enrichment facility in operation since 2006. Built deep inside the mountains some 48km (30 miles) from the Iranian city of Qom, north of Tehran, the site enjoys natural cover. The primary focus of Sunday’s strikes, Fordow was hit with 14 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOPs) or “bunker-buster” bombs delivered from B-2 stealth bomber planes, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a briefing on Sunday. The 13,000kg (28,700lb) GBU-57 MOP is the most powerful bunker-buster bomb, able to penetrate 60m (200 feet) below ground and delivering up to 2,400kg (5,300lb) of explosives, while the bombers are hard to detect. Israel had earlier attacked Fordow on June 13, causing surface damage, but security analysts believe only US bunker busters can penetrate the facility. An independent assessment of the scale of the damage is not yet available.
- Natanz is considered the largest nuclear enrichment facility in Iran, located about 300km (186 miles) south of Tehran. It is believed to consist of two facilities. One is the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant (PFEP), which is a test and research facility located above ground and used to assemble centrifuges, rapidly rotating machines used for uranium enrichment. According to the non-profit Nuclear Threat Initiative, the facility had close to a thousand centrifuges. The other facility, located deep beneath the ground, is the Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP). US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Dan Caine said on Sunday that “more than two dozen” Tomahawk missiles were fired at Natanz and Isfahan. US media earlier reported the missiles were launched by submarines.
- Isfahan is an atomic research facility located in the central city of Isfahan. It was built in the 1970s and was used for uranium conversion. It was the last location hit before the US bombing mission, which involved about 125 aircraft, withdrew from the Iranian airspace, according to officials. Hegseth said the Iranians did not detect the mission and were notified afterwards.
Are the sites destroyed?
Independent impact assessment of the US strikes at Fordow remains unclear.
Hegseth on Sunday said the US’s “initial assessment is that all our precision munitions struck where we wanted them to strike and achieved the desired effect”, citing particular damage at Fordow.
An Iranian lawmaker told Al Jazeera that the site suffered superficial damage. Israeli strikes on the plant last week only caused “limited, if any, damage” at the underground plant, according to IAEA boss Rafael Grossi.
The extent of damage at Natanz is also unclear following Sunday’s strike. Earlier Israeli attacks “completely destroyed” the above-ground plant, and caused centrifuges in the underground parts of the uranium plant to be “severely damaged if not destroyed altogether”, even though it was not directly hit, Grossi told reporters last week.
Meanwhile, the IAEA said on Sunday that six buildings at Isfahan suffered damage following the US attacks, including a workshop handling contaminated equipment. Earlier Israeli strikes had damaged four buildings on the site, the agency had reported, including the plant’s central chemical laboratory.
Initial reports from Iran and neighbouring Gulf countries such as Kuwait further indicate that there is no significant leakage of radioactive material from any of the plants. That could suggest that Iranian officials might have moved the stockpiles of enriched uranium out of the facilities targeted by the US, analysts say.
According to the IRNA news agency, Reza Kardan, the deputy director of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and the head of the National Nuclear Safety System Center in the country, confirmed on Sunday that “no radiation contamination or nuclear radiation has been observed outside” the sites.
“Preliminary plans had been made and measures had been taken to protect the safety and health of the dear people of the country, and despite the criminal actions this morning in attacking nuclear facilities, due to the previously planned measures and the measures taken, no radiation contamination or nuclear radiation has been observed outside these sites and facilities,” Kardan said.
The IAEA also said the radiation levels near targeted sites had not increased.
“Following attacks on three nuclear sites in Iran – including Fordow – the IAEA can confirm that no increase in off-site radiation levels has been reported as of this time,” the agency said in a social media post on Sunday.
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, says it is likely Iran had taken precautionary actions ahead of the US attacks.
“It appears that they already had gotten an advanced warning,” he told Al Jazeera.
“They understood that he [Trump] was buying time while moving military assets in order to actually strike. So, I think for some time they have moved those assets – where they are is unclear at this point.”
Will this derail Iran’s nuclear efforts?
The impact of the strikes on Iran’s overall nuclear programme is yet unknown.
However, analysts say there was no clear evidence that Iran had advanced so far as to be able to reach weaponisation in its nuclear programme in the first place.
Parsi said Iran’s most valuable nuclear asset is its stockpile of enriched uranium.
“As long as they continue to have that, they still actually have very much a nuclear programme that still could be weaponised,” he added.
“And I think we are going to start to hear from the Israelis in rather short order, that this was not the type of successful strike Trump has claimed, but they are going to start making the case that there needs to be a more ongoing bombing campaign against Iran.”
Has Iran’s nuclear programme suffered setbacks before?
- Yes. Iran’s nuclear ambitions started back in the 1950s under the leadership of the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a close ally of the US and Israel. The shah’s original vision was to build Iran’s nuclear capacities for both energy generation and, to a lesser extent, weapons manufacturing. The US, Germany, and France all supported the country with aid and technology. However, following the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the new government, under leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, halted or paused parts of the programme, arguing that it was expensive and that it represented Iran’s continued reliance on Western technology.
- Shelved or cancelled programmes further took a hit during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) when the country was forced to divert resources to the war effort after Iraq’s invasion. Its Bushehr nuclear reactor site, which was under construction as part of a partnership with the industrial manufacturing giant Siemens, was bombed severely by Iraq and was left in near-total damage. Siemens eventually withdrew from the project. The government would later on reportedly restart the nuclear programme, although Iranian leadership has always insisted it is pursuing nuclear power for civilian use.
- Stuxnet – a computer virus developed by Israel and the US, likely launched back in 2005 but discovered in 2010 – caused extensive damage to Iran’s nuclear capabilities. The programme, nicknamed Operation Olympic Games, compromised the Iranian network and caused centrifuges to tear themselves apart. It reportedly expanded rapidly under former US President Barack Obama, but began during the administration of US President George W Bush.
- Under the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (officially known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA), the country was forced to limit its enrichment capabilities in exchange for sanctions relief. The deal, signed between Iran, China, Russia, the US, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the European Union, capped enrichment at 3.67 percent. Sanctions, some of them in place since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, were gradually removed. Tehran complied with the terms of the deal, according to the (IAEA). It also agreed to allow the IAEA regular monitoring access. However, Trump pulled out of the agreement during his first term as US president in 2018, and slapped on sanctions as part of a “maximum pressure” campaign, forcing Tehran to also discard the terms though it continued to cooperate with the IAEA.
