Washington / Tehran / Tel Aviv - In the early hours of June 22, 2025, the world changed. Three targeted U.S. airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear core sites - Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan - struck not only military objectives but unleashed a geopolitical earthquake whose aftershocks remain unforeseeable. What began as a coordinated operation with Israel escalated into a full-blown U.S. intervention in the Israel-Iran conflict - with uncertain consequences, enormous risks and global repercussions. U.S. President Donald Trump declared on Sunday morning at the White House that Iran’s nuclear program had been “completely and totally wiped out.” It was the public culmination of what the Pentagon internally referred to as “Operation Midnight Hammer” - a nighttime assault carried out by B-2 stealth bombers that crossed the Mediterranean, Israel, Jordan and Iraq before penetrating Iranian airspace. Fourteen bunker-busting bombs were dropped - their impacts caused “extremely severe damage and destruction” at all three target sites, according to U.S. Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine. The Department of Defense repeatedly emphasized that this was not an attempt at regime change - no troops or civilians had been targeted deliberately. Yet the damage - political, strategic and diplomatic - is done.
At the center of attention is the underground facility at Fordo - not only because of its depth, but because of the question of what was still located there at the time of the attack. Even before the U.S. strike, satellite images showed that Iran had sealed the access tunnels with earth. Several vehicles were also spotted at the site - possible indications of a transport of sensitive materials. And indeed, high-ranking Iranian officials such as Behrouz Kamalvandi, spokesman for the Atomic Energy Organization, and former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezaei, claimed that enriched uranium and key centrifuge components had been “removed in time.” This remains unverified independently - but international experts are alarmed. “The central question is where Iran is now storing its already enriched stockpiles - because with high probability, they have been moved to secret, more heavily protected locations,” says Darya Dolzikova, a disarmament expert at the UK-based Royal United Services Institute. Even before the start of Israel’s air campaign on June 13, Iran had announced it was activating a third, previously unknown enrichment facility. Dolzikova warns of a “new nuclear blind flight” - without access to information and sites, it will soon be nearly impossible to reliably assess Iran’s actual progress in its enrichment program.
Global concern is also growing. France expressed “concern” over the U.S. attacks and reaffirmed its opposition to an Iranian nuclear weapons program - but also called for de-escalation and a return to diplomacy. Russia, by contrast, condemned the strikes as a “blatant breach of international law” and warned of “radiological consequences” and a “dangerous escalation” with global security implications. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) scheduled an emergency meeting for Monday, after its Director General Rafael Grossi had already come under heavy criticism from Tehran in recent days. Meanwhile, U.S. troops in the Middle East were placed on the highest alert - especially in Syria, Iraq and the Persian Gulf. The U.S. military warned of a “high risk” to commercial shipping in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. The Houthi militia already announced retaliatory attacks on U.S. targets. Despite all these signs of escalation, Washington maintains that it does not seek an open war. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called it a “deliberately limited operation” - but amid destroyed bunkers, sealed tunnels, vanished uranium and rhetorical saber-rattling, only one certainty remains: the shadow of a greater war has grown thicker. And the question of whether the world can still avert it becomes harder to answer with each passing hour.
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