As most of you have seen, the U.S. bombed three nuclear enrichment sites in Iran the night of Saturday, June 21.

Here is everything I have seen and my key take aways from President Trump’s address to the nation last night.

The Timeline – sourced from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist.

The conflict with Iran spans decades. Back in 1968, Iran signed the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) which means that they will not try and create their own nuclear weapons.

The main goals of NPT aim to (1) prevent countries creating and acquiring nuclear weapons, (2) only using “the atom” for peaceful processes and (3) disarmament of nuclear weapons.

Goal 1 is pretty straight forward. No country who doesn’t have nuclear weapons at the time the treaty was signed will not get nuclear weapons. This treaty was signed at the height of the Cold War when both the U.S. and the USSR were trying to beef up their arsenals and were arming their allies close to the other competing nation.

I point to the U.S. putting nuclear weapons in Turkey facing toward the USSR and the Cuban Missile Crisis where the USSR gave the government of Cuba nuclear weapons to threaten the U.S.

Goal 3 tries to get rid of nuclear weapons completely meaning that the nine countries who do have nuclear weapons, the U.S., the U.K., China, Russia, India, Pakistan, France, North Korea and Israel, will destroy the arsenals they currently maintain and not produce more nuclear weapons.

Has this goal been enforced? No. Not even close.

Now Goal 2 implies that there are good uses for nukes. This focuses on nuclear power fueling countries. The question now lies on if Iran was using the nuclear enrichment sites for nuclear power or nuclear warheads.

In 2003, it came out that Iran was enriching uranium for the purpose of nuclear weapons. There was some back and forth with Iran agreeing to stop the enrichment and the creation of new enrichment centers then turning around and resuming the practices.

The international community questioned Iran’s need for nuclear power when they are an oil-and coal-rich country. Former President Barack Obama questioned the motives of Iran’s secret nuclear enrichment centers back in 2010.

An agreement called the The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or commonly referred to as the “Iran deal” was established between the U.S. and Iran in September of 2015. This deal would let Iran continue to enrich uranium but not create military or weapon-grade enriched material and sanctions against Iran would be lifted.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu predicted that Iran would violate that deal. I mention Netanyahu now because he comes into play in 2025 as you might know if you’ve taken a peek at the news.

President Trump, in his first term, backed the U.S. out of the Iran deal and reinstated sanctions against Iran saying that the deal was “one-sided.”

Fast forward to 2024 and 2025. Israel and Hamas were going head to head in what can only be described as a genocide in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and Iran backed Hamas in this most recent conflict.

Now, there were talks of a new “Iran deal” in the works according to the Trump administration this year but those fell through when Iran rejected a deal on June 9 that would create a regional Middle East nuclear consortium which would supply the enriched uranium for public use which would mean Iran would have to give up control of the current enrichment program.

Then starting on June 13, Israel conducted preemptive strikes on Tehran, Iran’s capital in retaliation for them starting up their nuclear enrichment program that has nuclear weapon capabilities which was suspended in 2003.

Trump supported Israel’s decision to attack and not long after that, the U.S. conducted air strikes on three uranium enrichment sites, Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan using B-2 bombers and 14 “bunker buster” bombs.

U.S. Secretary of Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in a congressional hearing in March that Iran did not have nuclear weapons nor were they building nuclear weapons. But President Trump said Gabbard was wrong and that Iran was within weeks of having nuclear weapons.

“I don’t care what she said,” Trump said to reporters on Air Force One. “I think they were very close to having one.”

I have some confusion about where Trump received this information about Iran being close to having nuclear weapons if his own intelligence community made up of 17 different alphabet agencies said that Iran wasn’t close to having nuclear weapons.

Trump has stated that these were targeted attacks meaning that they were only focusing on the nuclear enrichment sites and not the general Iranian public.

The Trump administration has signaled a willingness to open up more negotiations between the U.S., Iran and Israel as of Sunday morning. I do not think that Iran will come back to the table.

Reflection

I am writing this post the day after the news broke. To say I lost some sleep over this is an understatement. I was raised in a Marine Corps family which meant that my dad was not home for most of my childhood because he was deployed to Iraq multiple times.

It comes as no surprised that we have seen this play out before. Former President George W. Bush and his administration claimed that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” only to find out that was false.

A 20 year war was waged in the Middle East over a lie. We are seeing the same thing happen again. The difference I’m seeing is in the use of social media.

People now have the ability to express what they are thinking and we can figure out that this threat of Iran having nuclear weapon capabilities doesn’t make sense.

I find it interesting that back in January of 2020 there were beliefs that World War III would start over the first Trump Administration ordering an air strike to kill Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani. We are back in the same boat.

All over social media people are saying that we are at the start of World War III all over again and it’s the same actors, the U.S. targeting and attacking Iran.

I wonder why the Trump administrations (both from 2016 and now) have hyper-fixated on starting conflict with Iran.

We as U.S. citizens were under the impression that the new administration wanted to stay out of senseless wars, to focus on American first. We can clearly see that is not the case.

Even Marjorie Taylor Green, R-G.A., who is a die-hard Trump supporter, has even spoken out against U.S. involvement in foreign wars just the day before the bombings on Iran. The day of the bombing she tweeted “Let us all join together and pray for peace.”

Trump’s response and decision to bomb Iran was very quick, he said he’d deliberate for two weeks before acting. It was eight days.

If Iran truly had nuclear weapon capabilities the U.S. would not have attacked. Mutually assured destruction and the nuclear dilemma would have prevented that. It’s why the U.S. and the USSR never launched nukes at each other. They knew the other would retaliate with the same, if not greater measures.

The underlying motive for this recent attack on Iran remains to be seen, to me at least.