This story has been updated.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — The U.S. military struck three sites in Iran early Sunday, directly joining Israel ’s war aimed at decapitating the country’s nuclear program in a risky gambit to weaken a longtime foe amid Tehran’s threat of reprisals that could spark a wider regional conflict.
President Donald Trump said Iran’s key nuclear sites were “completely and fully obliterated” by U.S. strikes.
Trump made the comments at the White House Saturday night hours after announcing the U.S. military had carried out strikes against three key nuclear facilities in Iran.
The president also warned Tehran against carrying out retaliatory attacks against the U.S., saying Iran has choice between “peace or tragedy.”
Iran’s nuclear agency on Sunday confirmed attacks took place on its Fordo, Isfahan and Natanz atomic sites, but is insisting its work will not be stopped.
The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran issued the statement after President Donald Trump announced the American attack on the facilities.
“The Atomic Energy Organization of Iran assures the great Iranian nation that despite the evil conspiracies of its enemies, with the efforts of thousands of its revolutionary and motivated scientists and experts, it will not allow the development of this national industry, which is the result of the blood of nuclear martyrs, to be stopped,” it said in its statement.
The decision to directly involve the U.S. in the war comes after more than a week of strikes by Israel on Iran that aimed to systematically eradicate the country’s air defenses and offensive missile capabilities, while damaging its nuclear enrichment facilities. But U.S. and Israeli officials have said that American stealth bombers and the 30,000-pound (13,500-kilogram) bunker buster bomb they alone can carry offered the best chance of destroying heavily fortified sites connected to the Iranian nuclear program buried deep underground.
President Trump was the first to disclose the strikes. “We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan,” Trump said in a post on social media. “All planes are now outside of Iran air space. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow. All planes are safely on their way home.”
Trump added in a later post that he would address the nation at 10 p.m. Eastern time, writing “This is an HISTORIC MOMENT FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, ISRAEL, AND THE WORLD. IRAN MUST NOW AGREE TO END THIS WAR. THANK YOU!”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Trump’s decision to attack in a video message directed at the American president.
“Your bold decision to target Iran’s nuclear facilities, with the awesome and righteous might of the United States, will change history,” he said. Netanyahu said the U.S. “has done what no other country on earth could do.”
The White House and Pentagon did not immediately elaborate on the operation. But Fox News host Sean Hannity said shortly after 9 p.m. Eastern that he had spoken with Trump and that six bunker buster bombs were used on the Fordo facility. Hannity said 30 Tomahawk missiles fired by U.S. submarines 400 miles away struck the Iranian nuclear sites of Natanz and Isfahan.
Members of Connecticut’s congressional delegation questioned the constitutionality of the attacks.
U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, who represents Connecticut’s 4th congressional district, called the action “a clear violation of the Constitution” in a statement late Saturday. Himes said only Congress has the power to declare war.
“It is impossible to know at this stage whether this operation accomplished its objectives,” he said in the statement. “We also don’t know if this will lead to further escalation in the region and attacks against our forces, events that could easily pull us even deeper into a war in the Middle East.”
Himes, who plays a key role in overseeing the intelligence community and threats to the U.S. as the ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, said he was “continuing to closely monitor the situation and demand answers from the Administration.”
U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, D-2nd District, also raised questions about the legality of the action.
“Four-star Army General David Petraeus’ famous 2003 maxim about the Iraq War, ‘tell me how this ends,’ should be at the forefront in the mind of every American, particularly President Trump, who hit Iran with military force without a declaration of war which the Constitution clearly requires,” said Courtney, the Ranking Member of the House Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee.
“I will be pushing to assert Congressional authority and oversight, particularly focused on force protection of U.S. servicemembers in the region, who are exposed to the highest risk of harm,” he said.
U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-3rd District, also condemned the attack.
“President Trump’s decision to launch direct military action against Iran without Congressional approval is a violation of the Constitution, which grants the power to declare war explicitly to the Congress,” DeLauro said in a statement. “With so many dangerous consequences which may result in further escalation, this action threatens U.S. military assets and risks the lives of servicemembers in the region. This could drag the United States into an extended war in the Middle East — a war the American people do not want. I am continuing to closely monitor the situation and demanding answers from the Administration.”
U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes, D-5th District, echoed those concerns.
“Unilateral military action without congressional authorization is a violation of the Constitution and exceedingly dangerous,” Hayes said in a statement. “Furthermore, the intelligence assessments of the situation have been conflicting. Congress must assert our foundational authority immediately to ensure Americans are not dragged into an endless war in the Middle East.”
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., a member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called the attack “illegal.”
“Donald Trump, a weak and dangerously reckless president, has put the United States on a path to a war in the Middle East that the country does not want, the law does not allow, and our security does not demand,” Murphy said in a statement.
“Our president knows nothing about history. And history tells us that the United States’ hubris about the efficacy of military action in the Middle East is almost universally wrong. Trump has been goaded into these strikes by the perpetual cheerleaders of war in the Middle East — the people who know how to start conflicts there but never know how to end them, and the people who profit — politically and financially — from endless war,” he said.
“I’ve been briefed on the intelligence — there is no evidence Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States,” Murphy continued. “That makes this attack illegal. Only Congress can declare preemptive war, and we should vote as soon as possible on legislation to explicitly deny President Trump the authorization to drag us into a conflict in Middle East that could get countless Americans killed and waste trillions of dollars. All my thoughts tonight are for the safety of our personnel in the region.”
The strikes are a perilous decision, as Iran has pledged to retaliate if the U.S. joined the Israeli assault, and for Trump personally. He won the White House on the promise of keeping America out of costly foreign conflicts and scoffed at the value of American interventionism.
Trump told reporters Friday that he was not interested in sending ground forces into Iran, saying it’s “the last thing you want to do.” He had previously indicated that he would make a final choice over the course of two weeks.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned the United States on Wednesday that strikes targeting the Islamic Republic will “result in irreparable damage for them.” And Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei declared “any American intervention would be a recipe for an all-out war in the region.”
Trump has vowed that he would not allow Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon, and he had initially hoped that the threat of force would bring the country’s leaders to give up its nuclear program peacefully.
The Israeli military said Saturday it was preparing for the possibility of a lengthy war, while Iran’s foreign minister warned before the U.S. attack that American military involvement “would be very, very dangerous for everyone.”
The prospect of a wider war loomed. Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen said they would resume attacks on U.S. vessels in the Red Sea if the Trump administration joined Israel’s military campaign. The Houthis paused such attacks in May under a deal with the U.S.
The U.S. ambassador to Israel announced that the U.S. had begun “assisted departure flights,” the first from Israel since the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, that sparked the war in Gaza.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday that Trump planned to make his decision on the strikes within two weeks. Instead, he struck just two days later.
Trump appears to have made the calculation — at the prodding of Israeli officials and many Republican lawmakers — that Israel’s operation had softened the ground and presented a perhaps unparalleled opportunity to set back Iran’s nuclear program, perhaps permanently.
The Israelis say their offensive has already crippled Iran’s air defenses, allowing them to already significantly degrade multiple Iranian nuclear sites.
But to destroy the Fordo nuclear fuel enrichment plant, Israel appealed to Trump for the bunker-busting American bomb known as the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, which uses its weight and sheer kinetic force to reach deeply buried targets and then explode. The bomb is currently delivered only by the B-2 stealth bomber, which is only found in the American arsenal.
If deployed in the attack, it would be the first combat use of the weapon.
The bomb carries a conventional warhead, and is believed to be able to penetrate about 200 feet (61 meters) below the surface before exploding, and the bombs can be dropped one after another, effectively drilling deeper and deeper with each successive blast.
The International Atomic Energy Agency has confirmed that Iran is producing highly enriched uranium at Fordo, raising the possibility that nuclear material could be released into the area if the GBU-57 A/B were used to hit the facility.
Previous Israeli strikes at another Iranian nuclear site, Natanz, on a centrifuge site have caused contamination only at the site itself, not the surrounding area, the IAEA has said.
Trump’s decision for direct U.S. military intervention comes after his administration made an unsuccessful two-month push — including with high-level, direct negotiations with the Iranians — aimed at persuading Tehran to curb its nuclear program.
For months, Trump said he was dedicated to a diplomatic push to persuade Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions. And he twice — in April and again in late May — persuaded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to hold off on military action against Iran and give diplomacy more time.
The U.S. in recent days has been shifting military aircraft and warships into and around the Middle East to protect Israel and U.S. bases from Iranian attacks.
All the while, Trump has gone from publicly expressing hope that the moment could be a “second chance” for Iran to make a deal to delivering explicit threats on Khamenei and making calls for Tehran’s unconditional surrender.
“We know exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding,” Trump said in a social media posting. “He is an easy target, but is safe there – We are not going to take him out (kill!), at least not for now.”
The military showdown with Iran comes seven years after Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Obama-administration brokered agreement in 2018, calling it the “worst deal ever.”
The 2015 deal, signed by Iran, U.S. and other world powers, created a long-term, comprehensive nuclear agreement that limited Tehran’s enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.
Trump decried the Obama-era deal for giving Iran too much in return for too little, because the agreement did not cover Iran’s non-nuclear malign behavior.
Trump has bristled at criticism from some of his MAGA faithful, including conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, who have suggested that further U.S. involvement would be a betrayal to supporters who were drawn to his promise to end U.S. involvement in expensive and endless wars.
CT Mirror staff contributed to this report.