United States Bombs Iran’s Nuclear Facilities

the United States attacked three nuclear facilities in Iran.This action followed difficult negotiations during the spring of 2025 between the Trump administration and Iranian leaders over Iran's nuclear program.On June 13, as the progress of these negotiations looked dubious, Israel launched its own preemptive strikes against Iran and its nuclear program.Israel urged the United States to join in the attacks, as the United States possesses "bunker buster bombs" that could damage Iranian facilities located deep underground.After mixed signaling, President Donald J. Trump authorized the June 22 strike.The United States claims that its strike was consistent with international law as lawful collective self-defense of Israel, but this position rests on the tenuous legality of Israel's own strikes as lawful individual self-defense.Also disputed are the legality of the strike under U.S. domestic law and the scope of the damage caused by the United States.Following the strike, Iran responded several days later with a token attack on U.S. military bases in Qatar.At the time of this writing, a ceasefire of sorts is in place, but the possibility of further hostilities remains high.For many years, U.S. presidents have sought to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons.Iran has been a non-nuclear party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) since 1970, 1 but it has not complied with its treaty obligations, is strongly suspected of pursuing nuclear weapons, and has long been watched closely by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is the watchdog for the NPT. 2 A decade ago, in 2015, the Obama administration worked with other major countries in painstakingly negotiating an arrangement with Iran known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which reduced significant sanctions on Iran in exchange for Iran's curtailment of its nuclear program over a fifteen-year period. 3 The first Trump administration reneged on this deal, leading Iran to redouble its efforts toward nuclear weapons. 4Subsequent efforts by the Biden administration to restore the Obama-era deal were unsuccessful.During the decade between 2015 and 2025, U.S. administrations also sought to reduce or punish Iran's actions elsewhere in the Middle East, including its support for Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis.Perhaps the most dramatic-and legally contentious-U.S. activity in this regard was an air strike in 2020, authorized by President Trump during his first term in office, that killed Qasem Soleimani, the leader of the Quds Force of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as he was traveling in Iraq. 5 When President Trump took office for the second time in January 2025, U.S. intelligence reports suggested that Iran could convert its existing enriched uranium into weapon-usable 1