By his own account, the military operation that Donald Trump mounted against Iran over the weekend was an unqualified success. Saturday’s covert raid, in which U.S. bombers dropped a series of massive, tailor-made bombs onto fortified Iranian sites, left Tehran’s nuclear capability “completely and totally obliterated,” the president proclaimed in a triumphant White House address late that night.
The reality is more complex. Although the operation achieved an impressive level of tactical success, with a swarm of warplanes penetrating Iran unchallenged following a long, undetected flight from Missouri, it will be far harder than the president has suggested to reliably evaluate the damage inflicted on Iran’s ability to manufacture a nuclear weapon. The information that’s emerged so far suggests to experts that Iran’s nuclear capacities have been set back significantly but that the two-decade atomic standoff with Iran is by no means over.
In the 48 hours since the strikes, Trump’s top advisers have given differing answers about the fate of Iran’s stockpiles of enriched uranium, which, satellite imagery suggests, Iranian authorities may have relocated prior to the strikes. Iranian leaders, meanwhile, have given no indication that they are ready to surrender the nuclear program. Facing the likelihood of ongoing U.S. and Israeli attacks, they may be more likely to make the long-feared decision to try to race toward a bomb.
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“This is probably not the end of the program, and certainly not the end of their aspirations,” Daniel Shapiro, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and a top Pentagon official for the Middle East under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, told us.
He said that, prior to Saturday’s strikes, Iran had been “days away” from being able to enrich to weapons-grade levels, and had been working to shorten the time required to turn its material into a bomb. “That means that absent the U.S. and Israeli strikes, we would be sitting on a knife’s edge, which was not acceptable,” said Shapiro, who is now a fellow at the Atlantic Council. Iranian leaders, however, may now judge it necessary to abandon United Nations restrictions and rush toward weaponization to survive. “And so there’s the other side of the knife’s edge, which has the potential to be even worse,” Shapiro said.
Since Saturday, Trump has shown little tolerance for those who have criticized the wisdom of what the Pentagon has dubbed “Operation Midnight Hammer.” The president’s allies are now seeking to unseat Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican who complained about the sidelining of Congress’s constitutional authority to declare war. Trump has also pushed back against skeptical coverage in the press. “The sites that we hit in Iran were totally destroyed, and everyone knows it,” he posted today on Truth Social.
His ire has even been directed at some in his own administration. According to one outside adviser, Trump has groused in private about the early assessments from those, including Vice President J. D. Vance and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine, who allowed for the possibility that the Iranian sites were anything other than completely wiped out. “The president simply wants a black-and-white success,” the adviser told us. (Like others interviewed for this story, the adviser spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters).
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Trump has also indicated to senior aides and allies that he would prefer Saturday’s strikes be a one-off rather than a sustained campaign against a country that, though weakened after 10 days of extensive bombing by Israel, retains substantial military power, according to the outside adviser and a senior White House official. The president likes the idea of a single, awe-inspiring, nuclear-facility-destroying show of force, and has expressed reluctance to go much beyond that. He has ruled out sending American troops on the ground and is mindful of the divide in his political base about a new foreign entanglement. But he has also left open the possibility of authorizing further attacks if Iran mounts any successful counteraction against the United States.
“He’s basking in the success and ability to do these things,” another outside adviser told us. “But I don’t get the impression that his appetite for prolonged military engagement has changed at this point.”
Iran today launched a series of missiles toward a major U.S. air base in Qatar, but U.S. military officials reported no significant damage. Afterwards, Trump derided Iran’s “very weak response” and announced that 13 out of 14 missiles had been shot down, while the 14th had been off target. The events suggest that, rather than escalating, military confrontation between the U.S. and Iran is winding down. In the early evening, Trump posted that the U.S., Israel, and Iran have reached agreement on a cease-fire that, he said, will bring “an official END to THE 12 DAY WAR.”
Before Iran’s counterattack today, Trump had indicated privately that he would be open to letting the exchange conclude so long as no Americans were killed, either at military bases in the Middle East or in the United States at the hands of a sleeper cell, according to the senior White House official and one of the outside advisers. They told us that Trump will have less patience for American military casualties or damage to American facilities than he did five years ago, when Iran struck at a U.S. base in Iraq following Trump’s decision to target the military leader Qassem Soleimani. Since the latest flare-up began, Trump has tried, with a series of social-media posts—including an incendiary one about “regime change”—to dissuade Tehran from taking action that would require a forceful response.
“If Iran wants the U.S. to be done, then the U.S. will be done,” an American official told us, summarizing Trump’s desire to take further military action only if Tehran were to pull off a significant retaliatory strike. A former U.S. intelligence officer told us that Iran’s counterstrike today was more symbolic than anything: It appeared aimed at “showing that they have not been completely cowed and that they can demonstrate to their own people, to the region, to their proxies, that they can defend Iranian sovereignty.”
Since Saturday, military and intelligence officials have been rushing to collect information about the extent of the damage to Iran’s nuclear program and its remaining capability. One senior Israeli official—whose country has perhaps the most granular knowledge of Iran’s program and the personnel involved in it—told us that the impact remains unclear but that Iran’s nuclear facilities have not been entirely destroyed. Assessing the damage is especially difficult because the country’s known centrifuges, at Fordo and Natanz, are buried underground. Although the Air Force’s B-2 pilots aimed their munitions at ventilation shafts and officials boasted of a clean hit, the extent of destruction is impossible to know from satellite imagery; international observers have also been unable to access the site. Not even the Iranians may know for sure how much, if anything, remains.
The relative dearth of information offers a sharp contrast to the war in Iraq, where the U.S. occupation that followed the 2003 invasion provided the U.S. military with an opportunity for an up-close study of its own weaponeering. After the initial wave of bombing, American troops’ ability to travel freely across Iraq allowed them to conduct inspections of the effects of explosives dropped from the sky. In some cases, U.S. troops climbed into the wreckage of bombed buildings and discovered that the destruction inflicted by U.S. munitions had fallen far short of what military calculations had predicted.
One former senior military official told us that the lessons in “weapons effects” drawn from that conflict also informed the development of newer, more potent bombs. That includes the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or GBU-57, which is the 30,000-pound “bunker-busting” bomb developed specifically for Iran’s underground nuclear sites. “The thing was built for that target,” the former official said. Fourteen of them were dropped over the weekend.
But without American personnel on the ground, and with the possibility that international inspectors will never reach the damaged sites, the Trump administration must rely on a combination of satellite imagery, intercepted Iranian communications, and human intelligence to assess the impact. Although Israel has demonstrated a remarkable penetration of Iran’s scientific and military establishment over the past year, even it may not know the location and condition of Iran’s enriched-uranium supply or the condition of its centrifuges and weapons-making components. No one knows, either, whether Iran, as it suggested earlier this month, can fall back on a third enrichment site it purports to have created, in addition to the damaged facilities at Fordo and Natanz.
After 10 days of Israeli strikes on Iran’s air- and missile-defense sites and other security installations, the country’s conventional military capability has been seriously weakened. But as Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at Harvard Kennedy School, noted to us, the long-term impact on the nuclear program is likely smaller. Meanwhile, any hope of a negotiated solution in which Iran agrees to give up enrichment is likely diminished.
Iran has long been divided between hard-liners who place high value on attaining a bomb and others who favor negotiations, sanctions relief, and global reintegration. Now the political power of the latter faction “has been destroyed by these strikes,” Bunn said. “There’s quite a number of people who are saying, Damn, we really need that nuclear weapon now.”
