US military strikes 'completely and totally obliterated' Iran's key nuclear facilities: Trump
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US military strikes 'completely and totally obliterated' Iran's key nuclear facilities: Trump
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CNA
an hour ago
- CNA
World braces for Iran's response to US strikes
ISTANBUL/WASHINGTON/JERUSALEM: The world braced on Sunday (Jun 22) for Iran's response after the US attacked key Iranian nuclear sites, joining Israel in the biggest Western military action against the Islamic Republic since its 1979 revolution. With the damage visible from space after 30,000-pound US bunker-buster bombs crashed into the mountain above Iran's Fordow nuclear site, Tehran vowed to defend itself at all costs. It fired another volley of missiles at Israel that wounded scores of people and flattened buildings in Tel Aviv. The US State Department ordered employees' family members to leave Lebanon and advised citizens elsewhere in the region to keep a low profile or restrict travel. An advisory from the US Department of Homeland Security warned of a "heightened threat environment in the United States." Law enforcement in major US cities stepped up patrols and deployed additional resources to religious, cultural and diplomatic sites. Tehran has so far not followed through on its threats of retaliation against the United States, either by targeting US bases or trying to choke off global oil supplies, but that may not hold. Speaking in Istanbul, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said his country would consider all possible responses. There would be no return to diplomacy until it had retaliated, he said. "The US showed they have no respect for international law. They only understand the language of threat and force," he said. Ali Shamkhani, an adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on X that the initiative was "now with the side that plays smart, avoids blind strikes. Surprises will continue!" US President Donald Trump, in a televised address, called the strikes "a spectacular military success" and boasted that Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities had been "completely and totally obliterated." But his own officials gave more nuanced assessments and, with the exception of satellite photographs appearing to show craters on the mountain above Iran's subterranean plant at Fordow, there has been no public accounting of the damage. The UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said no increases in off-site radiation levels had been reported after the US strikes. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi told CNN that it was not yet possible to assess the damage done underground. A senior Iranian source told Reuters that most of the highly enriched uranium at Fordow had been moved elsewhere before the attack. Reuters could not immediately corroborate the claim. Trump immediately called on Iran to forgo any retaliation, saying the government "must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks would be far greater and a lot easier," he said. US Vice President JD Vance said Washington was not at war with Iran but with its nuclear programme, adding this had been pushed back by a very long time due to the US intervention. In a step towards what is widely seen as Iran's most effective threat to hurt the West, its parliament approved a move to close the Strait of Hormuz. Nearly a quarter of global oil shipments pass through the narrow waters that Iran shares with Oman and the United Arab Emirates. Iran's Press TV said closing the strait would require approval from the Supreme National Security Council, a body led by an appointee of Khamenei. Attempting to choke off Gulf oil by closing the strait could send global oil prices skyrocketing, derail the world economy and invite almost certain conflict with the US Navy's massive Fifth Fleet, based in the Gulf and tasked with keeping the strait open. Security experts have long warned a weakened Iran could also find other unconventional ways to strike back, such as bombings or cyberattacks. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in an interview on "Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo," warned Iran against retaliation for the US strikes, saying such action would be "the worst mistake they've ever made." Rubio separately told CBS's "Face the Nation" talk show that the US has "other targets we can hit, but we achieved our objective." "There are no planned military operations right now against Iran," he later added, "unless they mess around." The UN Security Council was due to meet later on Sunday, diplomats said, at the request of Iran, which urged the 15-member body "to address this blatant and unlawful act of (US) aggression, to condemn it in the strongest possible terms." DIVERGING WAR AIMS Israeli officials, who began the hostilities with a surprise attack on Iran on Jun 13, have increasingly spoken of their ambition to topple the hardline Shi'ite Muslim clerical establishment that has ruled Iran since 1979. US officials, many of whom witnessed Republican President George W Bush's popularity collapse following his disastrous intervention in Iraq in 2003, have stressed that they were not working to overthrow Iran's government. "This mission was not and has not been about regime change," Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told reporters at the Pentagon. "The president authorised a precision operation to neutralise the threats to our national interests posed by the Iranian nuclear programme." Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch Trump ally, said on NBC's "Meet the Press with Kristen Welker" program that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had told him his country would no longer endure being under missile attack. "They're not going to live under threat from Iran anymore," Graham said. "Israel's made a decision. This regime is going to change in one of two ways: they're going to change their behavior, which I doubt, the regime itself, or the people are going to replace the regime.' Iranians contacted by Reuters described their fear at the prospect of an enlarged war involving the United States. "Our future is dark. We have nowhere to go - it's like living in a horror movie," Bita, 36, a teacher from the central city of Kashan, said before the phone line was cut. Much of Tehran, a capital city of 10 million people, has emptied out, with residents fleeing to the countryside to escape Israeli bombardment. Iranian authorities say more than 400 people have been killed since Israel's attacks began, mostly civilians. Israel's bombardment has scythed through much of Iran's military leadership with strikes targeted at bases and residential buildings where senior figures slept. Iran has been launching missiles back at Israel, killing at least 24 people over the past nine days, the first time its projectiles have penetrated Israel's defences in large numbers. The elite Revolutionary Guards said they had fired 40 missiles at Israel in the latest volley overnight. Air raid sirens sounded across most of Israel on Sunday, sending millions of people to safe rooms. In Tel Aviv, Aviad Chernovsky, 40, emerged from a bomb shelter to find his house had been destroyed in a direct hit. "It's not easy to live now in Israel (right now), but we are very strong. We know that we will win,' he said. Trump had veered between offering to end the war with diplomacy or to join it, at one point musing publicly about killing Iran's supreme leader. His decision ultimately to join the fight is the biggest foreign policy gamble of his career.
Straits Times
an hour ago
- Straits Times
Satellite images undermine Trump's claim that Iran's atomic sites were destroyed
Satellite image distributed by Maxar Technologies showing destroyed buildings at Isfahan Nuclear Technology Centre, before (left) after it was hit by US airstrikes. PHOTOS: REUTERS WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump's decision to order US forces to attack three key Iranian nuclear installations may have sabotaged the Islamic Republic's known atomic capabilities, but it's also created a monumental new challenge to work out what's left and where. Mr Trump said heavily fortified sites were 'totally obliterated' late on June 21, but independent analysis has yet to verify that claim. Rather than yielding a quick win, the strikes have complicated the task of tracking uranium and ensuring Iran doesn't build a weapon, according to three people who follow the country's nuclear programme. International Atomic Energy Agency monitors remain in Iran and were inspecting more than one site a day before Israel started the bombing campaign on June 13. They are still trying to assess the extent of damage, and while military action might be able to destroy Iran's declared facilities, it also provides an incentive for Iran to take its program underground. Mr Trump dispatched B-2 stealth jets laden with Massive Ordnance Penetrators, known as GBU-57 bombs, to attempt to destroy Iran's underground uranium-enrichment sites in Natanz and Fordow. Satellite images taken on June 22 of Fordow and distributed by Maxar Technologies show new craters, possible collapsed tunnel entrances and holes on top of a mountain ridge. They also show that a large support building on the Fordow site, which operators may use to control ventilation for the underground enrichment halls, remained undamaged. There were no radiation releases from the site, the IAEA reported. New pictures of Natanz show a new crater about 5.5 metres in diametre. Maxar said in a statement that the new hole was visible in the dirt directly over a part of the underground enrichment facility. The image doesn't offer conclusive evidence that the attack breached the underground site, buried 40 metres under ground and reinforced with an 8-metre think concrete and steel shell. US Air Force General Dan Caine told a news conference earlier on June 22 that an assessment of 'final battle damage will take some time.' IAEA inspectors, meanwhile, haven't been able to verify the location of the Persian Gulf country's stockpile of near-bomb-grade uranium for more than a week. Iranian officials acknowledged breaking IAEA seals and moving it to an undisclosed location. Indeed, there's just a slim possibility that the US entering the war will convince Iran to increase IAEA cooperation, said Ms Darya Dolzikova, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank. 'The more likely scenario is that they convince Iran that cooperation and transparency don't work and that building deeper facilities and ones not declared openly is more sensible to avoid similar targeting in future,' she said. The IAEA called on a cessation of hostilities in order to address the situation. Its 35-nation board will convene on June 23 in Vienna, Director-General Rafael Mariano Grossi said. Before the US intervention, images showed Israeli forces alone had met with limited success four days after the bombing began. Damage to the central facility in Natanz, located 300km south of Tehran, was primarily limited to electricity switch yards and transformers. The US also joined in attacking the Isfahan Nuclear Technology and Research Centre, located 450km south of Tehran. That was after the IAEA re-assessed the level of damage Israel had dealt to facility. Based on satellite images and communications with Iranian counterparts Isfahan appeared 'extensively damaged,' the agency wrote late on June 21. The IAEA's central mission is to account for gram-levels of uranium around the world and to ensure it isn't used for nuclear weapons. The latest bombing now complicates tracking Iranian uranium even further, said Dr Tariq Rauf, the former head of the IAEA's nuclear-verification policy. 'It will now be very difficult for the IAEA to establish a material balance for the nearly 9,000 kilograms of enriched uranium, especially the nearly 410 kilograms of 60 per cent enriched uranium,' he said. Last week, inspectors had already acknowledged they'd lost track of the location of Iran's highly enriched uranium stockpile because Israel's ongoing military assaults are preventing its inspectors from doing their work. That uranium inventory – enough to make 10 nuclear warheads at a clandestine location – was seen at Isfahan by IAEA inspectors. But the material, which could fit in as few as 16 small containers, may have already been spirited off site. 'Questions remain as to where Iran may be storing its already enriched stocks,' Ms Dolzikova said. 'These will have almost certainly been moved to hardened and undisclosed locations, out of the way of potential Israeli or US strikes.' Far from being just static points on a map, Iran's ambitions to make the fuel needed for nuclear power plants and weapons are embedded in a heavily fortified infrastructure nationwide. Thousands of scientists and engineers work at dozens of sites. Even as military analysts await new satellite images before determining the success of Mr Trump's mission, nuclear safeguards analysts have reached the conclusion that their work is about to become significantly harder. By bombing Iran's sites, Israel and the US haven't just disrupted the IAEA's accountancy of Iran's nuclear stockpile, they've also degraded the tools that monitors will be able to use, said Mr Robert Kelley, who led inspections of Iraq and Libya as an IAEA director. That includes the forensic method used to detect the potential diversion of uranium. 'Now that sites have been bombed and all classes of materials have been scattered everywhere the IAEA will never again be able to use environmental sampling,' he said. 'Particles of every isotopic description have infinite half-lives for forensic purposes and it will be impossible to sort out their origin.' BLOOMBERG Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
CNA
2 hours ago
- CNA
US urges China to dissuade Iran from closing Strait of Hormuz
WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday (Jun 22) called on China to encourage Iran to not shut down the Strait of Hormuz after Washington carried out strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. Rubio's comments on Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo" show came after Iran's Press TV reported that the Iranian parliament approved a measure to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which around 20 per cent of global oil and gas flows. "I encourage the Chinese government in Beijing to call them about that, because they heavily depend on the Straits of Hormuz for their oil," said Rubio, who also serves as national security adviser. "If they do that, it will be another terrible mistake. It's economic suicide for them if they do it. And we retain options to deal with that, but other countries should be looking at that as well. It would hurt other countries' economies a lot worse than ours." Rubio said a move to close the strait would be a massive escalation that would merit a response from the US and others. US officials said it "obliterated" Iran's main nuclear sites using 14 bunker-buster bombs, more than two dozen Tomahawk missiles and over 125 military aircraft. The strikes mark an escalation in the ongoing Middle Eastern conflict. Tehran has vowed to defend itself. Rubio on Sunday warned against retaliation, saying such an action would be "the worst mistake they've ever made." He added that the US is prepared to talk with Iran.
