After US Attacks Iranian Nuclear Sites, Trump Says Tehran Can Choose ‘Peace’ or ‘Tragedy’
The Wire Staff
New Delhi: US bombing has resulted in the ‘complete and total obliteration’ of Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities, and future attacks on the country will follow if Tehran ‘does not make peace’, President Donald Trump said on Sunday (June 22).
Earlier on Sunday morning in Indian time, Trump while announcing the attack on social media said that the US had struck Iranian nuclear enrichment sites at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan, with the “primary site [of] Fordow” being hit with “a full payload of BOMBS”.
Tehran's atomic energy organisation has acknowledged the attacks but did not say how much damage they had caused to the three facilities.
But it said the US's “lawless actions” would not cause “the development of this national industry to be halted”, per the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency as quoted by Bloomberg.
The BBC quoted Hassan Abedini, whom it identified as the ‘deputy political director of Iran's state broadcaster’, as claiming that Iran “didn't suffer a major blow because the materials had already been taken out” of the enrichment sites.
Iranian foreign minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi said that the US's “outrageous” attack was in violation of the UN Charter and will have “everlasting consequences”.
“Each and every member of the UN must be alarmed over this extremely dangerous, lawless and criminal behavior,” Araghchi wrote on X, adding that Iran reserved the right to defend itself as under the charter.
The US attacks come days after Trump said that he would decide on whether to involve America in the Iranian-Israeli conflict “within the next two weeks”, citing “a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place in the near future”.
That conflict began on June 13 with Israel commencing strikes on Iran – killing its top military leaders and striking the Natanz site on day one – on the alleged grounds that Tehran was on the cusp of obtaining a nuclear weapon.
In a public address on Sunday, Trump echoed the idea that Iran's nuclear programme posed a threat that had to be stemmed.
“Our objective was the destruction of Iran's nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world's number one state sponsor of terror,” he said.
Calling the US strikes a “spectacular military success”, Trump said the three sites “have been completely and totally obliterated”.
He continued: “There will either be peace or there will be tragedy for Iran far greater than what we've witnessed in the last eight days. Remember, there are many targets left. Tonight's [were] the most difficult of them all by far, and perhaps the most lethal.
“But if peace does not come quickly we will go after those other targets with precision, speed and skill. Most of them can be taken out in a matter of minutes.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – whom Trump said he worked with “like perhaps no team has ever worked before” – thanked the US president for the strikes in a video address.
“President Trump acted to deny the world's most dangerous regime the world's most dangerous weapons,” said Netanyahu, who said the American attack “will change history”.
The “primary site” of Fordow that Trump referred to – and which Israel has refrained from striking in its over-eight-day-long ‘Operation Rising Lion’ – lies deep beneath a mountain and was secretly installed by Tehran in the early 2000s.
It is thought that a total of about 3,000 enrichment centrifuges have been installed at the underground site since 2012.
Although Fordow is a smaller complex than Natanz, it is reportedly capable of producing purer grades of uranium, making it militarily far more significant.
Destroying such a facility would be especially difficult. The only bunker-busting bomb in the West big enough to achieve that task is owned by the US, with some reports saying that weapon was deployed on Sunday's attack on Iran.
The attack also marks a significant shift for Trump, who came to office promising he would keep the US out of foreign wars and often criticised military interventions.
The UN-linked International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said there was no increase in off-site radiation levels following the attack.
Its director general Rafael Mariano Grossi announced an emergency meeting of the IAEA's board of governors for Monday.
Meanwhile, the Israel Defence Forces announced on Sunday morning it had begun striking military targets in western Iran and that it had “swiftly neutralised the launchers that launched missiles toward Israeli territory a short while ago”.
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