President Trump announced on Saturday that the U.S. military had dropped 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on three of Iran’s nuclear sites, including its underground uranium-enrichment facility at Fordo.
The bombs were widely seen as the best chance of damaging or destroying Fordo, built deep into a mountain and untouched during Israel’s weeklong offensive, says The Associated Press.
The United States is the only military capable of dropping the weapons— using its B-2 Spirit stealth bombers.
The attacks are expected to have caused “very significant damage,” the United Nations’ atomic agency chief Rafael Grossi has said on Monday at a special meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s board, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Trump on Sunday raised the issue of regime change in Iran, as senior administration officials warned Iran against retaliation, says Reuters.
Retaliation
— Iran’s parliament voted on Sunday to close the Strait of Hormuz, according to Press TV, Iran’s network broadcasting in English. About 20 percent of the world’s oil passes through the strait.
— Across the region, there are more than 40,000 U.S. troops on bases and warships, and they’re now on high alert, braced for “almost-certain retaliation from Iran,” says The New York Times.
— Iran could attack U.S. embassies, and diplomats in Iraq and Israel have started evacuating, Euronews says.
— Iran's proxy in Yemen, the Houthis, had said on Saturday that they would target U.S. ships in the Red Sea if the United States participated in an attack against Iran, says Euronews.
— There’s currently no specific intelligence of a direct, credible threat against the U.S. homeland, says ABC News. FBI and Homeland Security officials had conference calls with some of the nation's governors on Sunday, specifically urging them to be alert for cyber and infrastructure threats.
Regime change
“Although it is true that many Iranians despise the ruling theocracy, and though it is true that the Iranian people are among the most pro-American in the region, there is no reason to be confident that even the most restive will welcome foreign intervention,” says Karim Sadjadpour, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who worked as an analyst with the International Crisis Group in Tehran from 2003 to 2005.
“And it is unlikely, at least in the short term, that what will follow this regime, if it falls, will be a secular liberal democracy with civil rights for women and religious minorities,” Sadjadpour says.
James Acton, chair and co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, tells The New Yorker, “Even a more pro-Western democratic regime, which I think is quite unlikely to emerge, would not necessarily give up the [nuclear] program just because of how wrapped up it is in Iranian self-image.”
Here is more on the strikes, from historian Heather Cox Richardson.
Here is reaction from world leaders, from Reuters.