The NPR Politics Podcast - The U.S. Strikes Nuclear Sites In Iran. Now What?

Episode Date: June 22, 2025

The U.S. launched a military strike against nuclear sites in Iran, further involving itself in Israel's conflict with Iran. We look at what happened, and the lasting implications of the action. This episode: senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, national security correspondent Greg Myre, and senior political editor & correspondent Domenico Montanaro. This podcast was produced by Bria Suggs and edited by Casey Morell. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from the Kresge Foundation. Established 100 years ago, the Kresge Foundation works to expand equity and opportunity in cities across America. A century of impact, a future of opportunity. More at kresge.org. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. It is 1046 a.m. on Sunday, June 22nd, 2025. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.

I'm Greg Meyry. I cover national security. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And we're in your feeds today because last night, the U.S. struck three nuclear sites in Iran. President Trump made the announcement on social media and then addressed the nation from the White House. Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated. Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. Greg, let's start with the details on the attack itself. What do you know about what happened and how it happened? itself. What do you know about what happened and how it happened? So the US unleashed B-2 stealth bombers and also used submarines to carry out this

powerful attack on three Iranian nuclear sites, Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan. These are all south of the capital Tehran, about a hundred to three hundred miles south of the capital. The attacks took place early Sunday morning before dawn local time, Saturday night in the U.S. Now pretty remarkable about these B-2 stealth bombers. They flew more than 30 hours round trip from Whiteman Air Force Base, which is outside Kansas City, and these planes dropped these massive 30,000 pound bunker busting bombs. First time these bombs have ever been used in combat. Now we know at least one sub, possibly more, were used to fire Tomahawk missiles as well.

Trump, as we've heard, is calling it a complete success, but it is going to take some time to get a full assessment on the extent of damage. We heard this in the Pentagon briefing this morning. You know, were these facilities completely destroyed or only partially destroyed? Where is this highly enriched uranium, 900 pounds or so of highly enriched uranium that Iran has? Was it at those sites? Is it now no longer usable? Or was it moved elsewhere beforehand? Is it now no longer usable or was it moved elsewhere beforehand? And ultimately just how long would this set back Iran's nuclear program? And those are questions that we simply don't

have answers to right now. That's right. Anytime the US carries out some sort of long-range attack, you need time to figure that out. The US will be using satellite photos, it will have other ways, perhaps intercepting communications among Iranian leaders to see if they're talking about the extent of damage. So in many, many ways US and others will be trying to figure out how bad the damage was, but that's going to take time, especially when we're talking about a facility, Fordow, which is built in, into a mountain, but the other facilities also had underground complexes.

So it will take some time. It's not something you'll, you'll get an instant answer to. Domenico Friday on this podcast, we were talking about how president Trump said he was going to make a decision in the next two weeks about what to do. Obviously, he made that decision, they move forward very quickly. How is the president and his administration justifying this decision to get directly involved

in a conflict with Iran? Yeah, and that comment about two weeks seemed to be a deliberate head fake to throw Iran off, to use this element of surprise, obviously, that you like to use in any kind of wartime activity. I think that the administration right now feels very bullish about this attack. They certainly are praising those who carried out the attack within the military. And we saw JD Vance, for example, on Meet the Press this morning,

though, saying that the US is not at war with Iran, but with its nuclear program. And that's a very fine line to walk, because we know that within President Trump's base, they don't necessarily want to see any kind of prolonged war effort within the Middle East. There's a lot of feelings of what happened with Afghanistan and Iraq, where I think that a lot of people are war weary about feeling like there could be a nation building situation, which is why there's been so much discussion

around whether or not Israel would attack the Supreme Leader in Iran. And I think the big questions are really when it comes to the political fallout of all this, what comes next. Yeah. And I will say that President Trump made it very clear both in his remarks last night and then in a social media post that he does not want Iran to retaliate, that what comes next he hopes is some sort of a peace process. This cannot continue. There will be either peace or there will be tragedy for Iran far

greater than we have witnessed over the last eight days. Remember, there are many targets left. Yeah, I think the thing though to look at here is how did we get into this situation in the first place? And, you know, it looked like at least a couple of weeks ago that Trump wanted diplomacy. He wanted to be able to talk to Iran, to try to get them to abandon their nuclear program, and so that he could sort of secure some kind of deal. These deals have really eluded him, whether it's a deal with trying to get a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, a deal between Russia and Ukraine, trying to get a nuclear deal

with Iran. All of these things have eluded him. And you have to wonder politically how Trump got himself to a place of wanting to conduct these attacks when it didn't seem like he wanted to do that at all from the start. And I think that there's some conversation around Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, and how they felt that Iran was vulnerable in this attack, and kind of maybe pushed Trump's hand to show that he was supporting Israel. And Trump, we know, does not want to be seen as weak or flailing and not acting decisively,

as has been some of the criticism of him when it comes to things like tariffs and the rest. Greg, it does seem like Trump and his administration are treating this like a one-off. This is not a war. This is going after these discrete targets and then they just kind of want to move on. Do you have a sense of why this happened now? I mean Iran's nuclear program has been vexing American presidents going back at least a generation. Yeah absolutely right, Tam. I think Israel in a sense forced the Americans here by by carrying out its

strike beginning about ten days ago. And so what we saw is an Iran that's very vulnerable right now. Its proxies in the region have been hit hard. Iran's own air defenses were weakened with an Israeli strike last year. So Israel began this process. You see how vulnerable they are. Israel has taken control of the skies and been able to inflict great damage on Iran, but they couldn't take out or do full damage to some of these nuclear sites, and so they wanted the US to help. Now is it something the US would have done if Israel hadn't already laid the groundwork and started this attack. Quite possibly not. So it has given Trump the option, or at least the belief, that

this could be done with one airstrike. We'll still have to see the extent of the damage. It may take some additional airstrikes from the U.S. And I would also note the U.S US has been involved helping Israel play defense, helping shoot down Iranian ballistic missiles going into Israel. So this may be a one-and-done in terms of an offensive US attack inside Iran, but the US will continue to help Israel guard against any any attacks coming out of Iran. If Iran tries to shut down the Strait of Hormuz where a lot of oil flows, the US Navy will probably get involved in that.

So it remains to be seen exactly what the US role will be going forward, but there probably will be some role even if it doesn't involve additional US airstrikes inside Iran. And how likely is it that Iran just doesn't retaliate, doesn't respond? Iran will probably feel the need to retaliate in some form. It could range from a very quick missile strike or drone strike against US forces in the region. There's roughly 40,000 US troops in the region at a range of bases at sea. So Iran could do something like that. It could plot to do something in the longer term,

which it has done before, going for a soft civilian target. But Iran's in a difficult position. They don't wanna look weak and do nothing, but if they do something, that could provoke the US to hit back again and perhaps even harder as President Trump mentioned so Iran doesn't want the US in this war in a full-fledged way

They would like to keep the US out of it to the maximum extent possible So do nothing and look weak do something and draw the US in in an even larger way Alright, well, we're gonna take a quick break and we'll have more in a moment. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things and other currencies. With WISE, you can send, spend, or receive money across borders, all at a fair exchange rate, no markups or hidden fees.

Join millions of customers and visit wis.com. T's and C's apply. And we're back. And Domenico, the idea of striking Iran has divided the MAGA movement, as you said earlier. So how is it playing now that President Trump has taken this action? Well, I think for the most part,

you're gonna see Republicans rallying around President Trump, and that's what we've seen already, where you've seen senators, congressmen saying that Iran was posing a threat to the United States. And polling has bared out that a lot of Americans agree that Iran did pose at least some threat to the United States. There was division going into this on whether or not the US should join Israel in its attack. In fact, overwhelmingly people said that they did not think that the US should join Israel in attacking Iran. But I think that once the PR sort of machine happens, as it's

happening now, this is going to become more of a kind of Trump proxy question as so many things have become, where most people are going to rally behind the president. You're going to hear some probably pretty prominent voices within the Republican or MAGA movement, I should say, who are going to say that there are real risks here, that there are potential downfalls. You don't want the US to get drawn in any further and that they're warning against something like that.

But I don't think it's going to necessarily hurt Trump with Republicans overall. And I think Democrats have to walk a line of how they talk about this because talking about being against this strike and talking about the legality of it, like we've heard from someone like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they were on the risk of looking like they're defending Iran. And I think that you don't want as a Democrat to appear that way either. At the same time, there are real legal questions,

and there are questions around what comes next. And we've seen, obviously in the last few decades, the United States not really having a plan B. Yeah, I've been fascinated watching Republicans and Trump supporters in the base figure out a way to make what the president did yesterday fit into the campaign that he ran, which was to be the peace candidate against forever wars and very much criticizing the Iraq war, criticizing Afghanistan. He was like, I'm going to be the candidate of peace. He talked about it in his inaugural address. You had someone like Senator Markowain Mullen from Oklahoma tweet, and I think this really just

captures the shift. He says, to those concerned about US involvement, this isn't a forever war. In fact, it's ending one. POTUS was clear, Iran must never have a nuclear weapon. MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk surfaced a tweet from 2011 when then not even a candidate, Trump, said that Iran having a nuclear weapon would be a danger to the US and they must never have a nuclear weapon. So there's a lot of work happening there. Totally.

And there's plenty of quotes from Trump that you can play from past debates, for example, where he sounded like someone who was not going to want to get involved in something like this and was much more protectionist, much more non-interventionist overseas. That's really what he wound up running on and was able to win over a lot of people who were war weary to his side. So I think that there's obviously going to be a lot of work that's being done. You hear this idea of quote unquote peace through strength, you know, about using these attacks to get peace.

But when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was asked about Iran earlier this year, she wasn't exactly ringing the fire alarms to say that Iran is on the precipice of having a nuclear weapon. So I think there's a lot of questions about whether or not this preemptive action frankly was warranted. Now that it's happened though, how will Americans feel about it? Again, I think that it's going to be something that just winds up dividing mostly along political lines but really isn't going to have to do with this attack in particular. The political fallout of this is going to really depend on what Iran winds up doing and whether the United States is able to repel any kind of attack and no Americans are harmed.

Domenico, I do want to go back to Democrats and the criticism that they are lodging here, which among other things includes that the White House hasn't made it clear that they have a plan for what comes next, but also that they weren't consulted, that Congress didn't authorize this attack. The Constitution says that presidents have to get congressional approval to carry out military action. Democrats are pointing to that, but over the years that has not been followed to the letter and it certainly wasn't last night. So do you see a world where Congress suddenly tries to reassert this authority that it really hasn't asserted since 9-11?

No. I think that there's going to be a debate about this for sure. Senator Tim Kaine from Virginia Democrat has been somebody who's been talking about this for a long time with presidents, frankly, on both sides of the aisle. I mean, I remember when the United States under President Obama underwent military action against Libya, and there were questions about whether or not Congress had to have a say on this. And using something like the authorization for military force that the congress passed to get into the iraq war seems like a far stretch i think for a lot of people but at the same time i think that the american people are probably pretty used to a president at this point taking action without congressional authorization there's going to be a debate about

it but it's hard to see that republicans many of them, there may be some, but not many who cross over to defy Trump on something like this. Greg, we talked about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. How does this compare to those wars that ultimately became quite unpopular? Yeah, at this stage, what we're seeing in Iran is extremely different from Iraq and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan in 2001, in Iraq in 2003, the US went in with the explicit intent of overthrowing those governments, the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq. It did that and it did it pretty quickly actually, but then it

got mired in this open-ended problem of trying to build a new country, create a new government, and a civil society that hadn't really existed, and they turned into 15-20 year operations that were incredibly frustrating for the U.S. Nobody wants to repeat that kind of experience and I think that's obviously animating the decision-making and what we're seeing here. The difference being that that Trump believes and many others believe as well that the US with one airstrike or a limited number of airstrikes could do something very important here, which is completely destroy or set back in a major way Iran's nuclear program, and that it is not an endless, open-ended kind of conflict. And nobody, either in

the United States or in Israel for that matter, is talking about sending ground troops into Iran, a country with 90 million people. So that's just not on the table at this point. It's hard to imagine it ever will be. So we certainly can't say that this conflict in Iran is over or that the U.S. won't continue to be involved. There may be more airstrikes. The U.S. will definitely be involved in helping Israel defend itself. The U.S. will be keeping an eye on the rest of the region. But it's not, certainly at this stage and in terms of the thinking, looking anything like a huge long-term ground operation in that country. And I think contextually, this has been something that Israel has been planning for for a very

long time. I mean, you are hearing about the potential to strike Iranian nuclear facilities in one way or another, militarily through cyber, which they have done, you know, for 20, 30 years. But I think this was a moment that the Israelis felt was ripe for being able to do this because their allies in the region who were supported by Iran, whether it's the Houthis or Hezbollah or Hamas or even Russia, given that what its involvement in Ukraine or Syria, given that that government was toppled, that their capabilities of being able to strike back were so limited that the United States in supporting Israel, they felt like this was a good time to be able to carry out something that could then weaken Iran's nuclear program.

And politically in the United States, as long as it's limited to these strikes and there aren't other ramifications for the United States, I think the Trump administration feels like it was worth the risk. All right. Well, let's leave it there for this Sunday. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Greg Meyry. I cover national security. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, Senior Political Editor and correspondent.

And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.