Sign up to receive CFR President Mike Froman’s analysis on the most important foreign policy story of the week, delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon. Subscribe to The World This Week.
U.S. President Donald Trump announced on June 21 that the United States had struck three major nuclear sites inside Iran as part of what he called “Operation Midnight Hammer.” With the attack, the United States joined Israel’s bombing campaign—aimed at derailing Iran’s program that both countries said was advancing close to producing nuclear weapons, a charge Iran denies—that began on June 13.
More on:
Operation Midnight Hammer involved 125 aircraft and specialty B-2 bombers that carry 30,000-pound bombs named Massive Ordinance Penetrators—colloquially known as “bunker busters.” These bombs are only owned by the United States, and experts believe it is the only ordinance capable of destroying Iran’s subterranean nuclear sites. General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said an initial assessment indicates that all three sites, Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan, “sustained extremely severe damage and destruction.”
According to a preliminary classified U.S. intelligence report, however, the American bombs only knocked Iran’s nuclear program back by less than six months, rather than being “totally obliterated,” as Trump initially claimed. The White House rebuffed the leaked Defense Intelligence Agency report, which is based on the Pentagon’s early damage assessment, calling it “flat-out wrong.”
Iran has more than thirty nuclear facilities spread out across the country, with several built deep underground. Here’s a look at those that have been targeted by the U.S. and Israeli operations, the damage some have sustained so far, and the possible consequences of striking nuclear facilities.
Natanz
Israel’s initial strikes severely damaged Natanz, Iran’s biggest uranium enrichment hub, around 140 miles south of Tehran. The U.S. campaign piled on to the damage, dropping one of the American bunker buster bombs on the area.
Satellite imagery of Natanz after Israel’s air strikes shows significant damage to the aboveground electric substation and pilot fuel enrichment plant. The IAEA also assessed that the subterranean enrichment halls were likely “severely damaged if not destroyed altogether.” IAEA chief Rafael Grossi told the UN Security Council on Friday that radiation levels outside the facility remained unchanged, but the damage had caused “radiological and chemical contamination” inside the facility that could be dangerous “if inhaled or ingested.”
More on:
Established in 2002, Natanz has three underground buildings, two of which can hold around 50,000 centrifuges (machines used to enrich uranium), and six buildings above ground. It has long been closely monitored by the IAEA and has been targeted in the past. This includes the so-called “Operation Olympic Games” cyber attacks carried out by the George W. Bush administration, which began in 2006 using the “Stuxnet” virus. Created with the help of Israel, the Stuxnet virus caused the Natanz centrifuges to spin uncontrollably and break. These cyber-warfare operations forced Iran to decommission and replace at least a thousand centrifuges.
Fordow
Fordow is the country’s most heavily fortified facility, a fuel enrichment plant with centrifuge capabilities, buried deep inside a mountain to shield it from attacks. It is lodged an estimated 260 feet below rock and soil and is reportedly protected by Iranian and Russian missile defense systems. It’s widely considered to be critical to Iran’s nuclear weapons program, putting it at the center of Israel and the United States’ stated objective to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
Israel attacked Fordow’s missile defense systems, but it appeared to have left the facility unscathed. That changed when Washington’s B-2 bomber dropped a bunker buster on the site on Saturday night, with initial footage showing massive plumes of smoke gathering above the clandestine subterranean location. Aerial imagery also revealed six large craters and ash blanketing the mountainside, but the damage to the facility itself remains unknown. Israel then followed up with another strike, two days later.
Trump said that Fordow and other sites targeted by the United States had been “completely and totally obliterated.” An Iranian government spokesperson maintained, however, that Fordow’s underground complex had “not suffered any irreversible damage.”
Due to Iran’s efforts to obscure its activities at Fordow, it is unclear when it began building the plant, but it’s believed to be between 2006–2007. The size, secrecy, and location of the site on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base have led to Israeli and U.S. allegations that Fordow has been used for covert production of weapons-grade nuclear materials.
Isfahan
A complex outside Isfahan is suspected to host near weapons-grade nuclear fuel. The facility is where natural uranium is converted into the gas that goes into centrifuges at Natanz and Fordow. The nuclear fuel center was brought online in 1974, while its nuclear tech center opened in 1984; the tech center has been a target of both U.S. and UN sanctions.
The United States pummeled Isfahan on Saturday with more than two dozen Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles fired from an Ohio-class nuclear submarine in the Gulf of Oman. Israel’s attack struck at least four buildings at Isfahan, including the uranium conversion facility where the gas is reverted back into a metal. This is one of the final stages that goes into making a weapon.
The Israeli strikes appear to have spared the nuclear fuel stockpile. As of Sunday, it was unclear what all was damaged in the U.S. attack.
Other Sites
Several nuclear facilities remain undamaged after the U.S.-Israeli attacks, including Arak, a highly secure complex thought to produce plutonium, and Bushehr, the country’s nuclear energy plant.
However, Israel also struck a university associated with the nuclear program as well as twelve missile sites, including Kermanshah, Bid Kaneh, Tabriz, Shiraz, and Piranshahr. The bombing campaign has also hit a military airport, a state-owned television broadcaster, and a prison. Over the weekend, Israel also attacked some of Iran’s critical energy infrastructure, including Tehran’s central gas depot, its oil refinery, and the South Pars, one of the world’s largest gas fields.
Altogether, more than six hundred people in Iran have been killed so far, and thousands more injured, according to Iran’s health ministry. Iran has responded with its own missile attacks on Israel, killing twenty-eight people there.
Scientists
Israel has a history of targeting Iranian scientists, and it has killed at least ten in these latest attacks. Fereydoon Abbasi, the former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, and Amir Hossein Feqhi, the organization’s former deputy head, were both killed. Nuclear faculty members at Shahid Beheshti University—Ahmadreza Zolfaghari, Abolhamid Minouchehr, and Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi—were also among the dead. At least seventeen senior security figureheads were also killed in Israel’s attacks.
“The loss of scientists can be a huge problem for Iran, if Israel is targeting the right ones—people with significant knowledge and experience,” Elliott Abrams, CFR senior fellow for Middle East Studies, says. “It’s hard to believe the program and the associated knowledge can be put to an end this way, but certainly the program can be delayed and undermined.”
Nuclear Fallout
There are roughly four hundred kilograms of enriched uranium located at facilities across Iran, and a strike on one of these targets could cause radiation levels harmful to the local population—though the severity of the disaster would depend on what kind of facility is ultimately hit and where it is located, according to CFR’s nuclear security expert, Erin D. Dumbacher.
Governments in the region, including Qatar’s, have voiced concern about the risk of strikes inadvertently igniting an explosion that spreads nuclear material further afield. The greatest risk of this would be if attacks struck a nuclear reactor (Bushehr or the Tehran Nuclear Research Center, which has a small research reactor).
“If the Bushehr site’s power source was affected, it could lead to forced evacuations like we saw after the Fukushima accident in Japan or food restrictions like Europe managed after Chernobyl to protect the health of residents for miles,” Dumbacher says.
Nuclear experts maintain, however, that attacks on Iran’s buried enrichment centers have a low risk of triggering radiation exposure. Both the IAEA and Iran’s neighbor, Saudi Arabia, had also reported that there has not been a discernible uptick in radiation levels since the U.S. attack on Saturday. There remain some concerns that uranium hexafluoride gas could come into contact with water and produce hydrofluoric acid, a highly potent chemical hazard. Workers in the area would be the most at risk of being affected by the toxic chemicals.
The hunt for the four hundred kilograms of enriched uranium continues in the aftermath of the U.S. and Israeli strikes. U.S. and international officials said they were unsure what became of them, so the question remains whether the attack destroyed the Iranian nuclear program, or just forced it into smaller, more secretive pockets of Iran’s web of thirty-odd nuclear sites. The same U.S. intelligence report said that Iran had moved most of its stockpile before Midnight Hammer, leaving most of it undamaged. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had “interesting intel” on its whereabouts, but did not elaborate.
And another kind of blowback could prove damaging to nonproliferation efforts by raising doubts among non-nuclear weapons states, Dumbacher says. “They might conclude that international transparency into their nuclear programs is of no consequence to a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council like the United States and only brings risks they’re not willing to take,” she adds.
Iran’s Response
As Iran has retaliated with strikes of its own on Israel, U.S. President Donald Trump in the days leading up to the U.S. overnight operation called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender.” He threatened to strike Iran if its leaders did not advance the protracted nuclear talks to cease uranium enrichment, and he encouraged them to return to negotiations after the U.S. attack. “We are at the precipice of, potentially, a conflict with Iran,” CFR Middle East expert Steven A. Cook says.
Iran has quickly condemned the U.S. strike, calling for a special UN Security Council session. It also said that it “reserves all options” to retaliate against what Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization has called a “barbaric violation” of international law. A military response against U.S. bases and service members in the region could pose great risks of escalation, experts said.
“Iranian attacks on U.S. bases would first of all be attacks on their neighbors, such as Qatar, the UAE, and Bahrain. More importantly, were they to kill American soldiers or sailors this way, one can imagine that the U.S. reaction would be fierce and would threaten the survival of the regime,” Abrams tells CFR.
Many security experts, including officials at the Department of Homeland Security, believe that Iran could resort to asymmetric methods. These include terrorist or cyber attacks, given that Israel has significantly reduced the IRGC’s military capabilities.
Iran’s parliament has also endorsed closing off the Strait of Hormuz, a vital passageway for oil and other goods, sending the global markets bracing for potentially ensuing economic ripples. That decision ultimately rests with Iran’s Supreme Council.
“Can the regime effectively mount a retaliation against American forces and bases and diplomatic facilities throughout the Middle East, of which there are many? I think the way in which the Iranians respond—if they can—will tell us a lot about the strength of the regime,” Cook says.
Will Merrow and Michael Bricknell created the map for this article.
U.S., Israel Attack Iranian Nuclear Targets—Assessing the Damage
The United States joined Israel’s bombing campaign of Iran’s nuclear program. A clear picture of the damage inside Iran—and the state of its nuclear strength—is still unfolding.
Last updated June 25, 2025 10:51 am (EST)
- Article
- Current political and economic issues succinctly explained.
Sign up to receive CFR President Mike Froman’s analysis on the most important foreign policy story of the week, delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon. Subscribe to The World This Week.
U.S. President Donald Trump announced on June 21 that the United States had struck three major nuclear sites inside Iran as part of what he called “Operation Midnight Hammer.” With the attack, the United States joined Israel’s bombing campaign—aimed at derailing Iran’s program that both countries said was advancing close to producing nuclear weapons, a charge Iran denies—that began on June 13.
More on:
Operation Midnight Hammer involved 125 aircraft and specialty B-2 bombers that carry 30,000-pound bombs named Massive Ordinance Penetrators—colloquially known as “bunker busters.” These bombs are only owned by the United States, and experts believe it is the only ordinance capable of destroying Iran’s subterranean nuclear sites. General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said an initial assessment indicates that all three sites, Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan, “sustained extremely severe damage and destruction.”
According to a preliminary classified U.S. intelligence report, however, the American bombs only knocked Iran’s nuclear program back by less than six months, rather than being “totally obliterated,” as Trump initially claimed. The White House rebuffed the leaked Defense Intelligence Agency report, which is based on the Pentagon’s early damage assessment, calling it “flat-out wrong.”
Iran has more than thirty nuclear facilities spread out across the country, with several built deep underground. Here’s a look at those that have been targeted by the U.S. and Israeli operations, the damage some have sustained so far, and the possible consequences of striking nuclear facilities.
Natanz
Israel’s initial strikes severely damaged Natanz, Iran’s biggest uranium enrichment hub, around 140 miles south of Tehran. The U.S. campaign piled on to the damage, dropping one of the American bunker buster bombs on the area.
Satellite imagery of Natanz after Israel’s air strikes shows significant damage to the aboveground electric substation and pilot fuel enrichment plant. The IAEA also assessed that the subterranean enrichment halls were likely “severely damaged if not destroyed altogether.” IAEA chief Rafael Grossi told the UN Security Council on Friday that radiation levels outside the facility remained unchanged, but the damage had caused “radiological and chemical contamination” inside the facility that could be dangerous “if inhaled or ingested.”
More on:
Established in 2002, Natanz has three underground buildings, two of which can hold around 50,000 centrifuges (machines used to enrich uranium), and six buildings above ground. It has long been closely monitored by the IAEA and has been targeted in the past. This includes the so-called “Operation Olympic Games” cyber attacks carried out by the George W. Bush administration, which began in 2006 using the “Stuxnet” virus. Created with the help of Israel, the Stuxnet virus caused the Natanz centrifuges to spin uncontrollably and break. These cyber-warfare operations forced Iran to decommission and replace at least a thousand centrifuges.
Fordow
Fordow is the country’s most heavily fortified facility, a fuel enrichment plant with centrifuge capabilities, buried deep inside a mountain to shield it from attacks. It is lodged an estimated 260 feet below rock and soil and is reportedly protected by Iranian and Russian missile defense systems. It’s widely considered to be critical to Iran’s nuclear weapons program, putting it at the center of Israel and the United States’ stated objective to destroy Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
Israel attacked Fordow’s missile defense systems, but it appeared to have left the facility unscathed. That changed when Washington’s B-2 bomber dropped a bunker buster on the site on Saturday night, with initial footage showing massive plumes of smoke gathering above the clandestine subterranean location. Aerial imagery also revealed six large craters and ash blanketing the mountainside, but the damage to the facility itself remains unknown. Israel then followed up with another strike, two days later.
Trump said that Fordow and other sites targeted by the United States had been “completely and totally obliterated.” An Iranian government spokesperson maintained, however, that Fordow’s underground complex had “not suffered any irreversible damage.”
Due to Iran’s efforts to obscure its activities at Fordow, it is unclear when it began building the plant, but it’s believed to be between 2006–2007. The size, secrecy, and location of the site on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) base have led to Israeli and U.S. allegations that Fordow has been used for covert production of weapons-grade nuclear materials.
Isfahan
A complex outside Isfahan is suspected to host near weapons-grade nuclear fuel. The facility is where natural uranium is converted into the gas that goes into centrifuges at Natanz and Fordow. The nuclear fuel center was brought online in 1974, while its nuclear tech center opened in 1984; the tech center has been a target of both U.S. and UN sanctions.
The United States pummeled Isfahan on Saturday with more than two dozen Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles fired from an Ohio-class nuclear submarine in the Gulf of Oman. Israel’s attack struck at least four buildings at Isfahan, including the uranium conversion facility where the gas is reverted back into a metal. This is one of the final stages that goes into making a weapon.
The Israeli strikes appear to have spared the nuclear fuel stockpile. As of Sunday, it was unclear what all was damaged in the U.S. attack.
Other Sites
Several nuclear facilities remain undamaged after the U.S.-Israeli attacks, including Arak, a highly secure complex thought to produce plutonium, and Bushehr, the country’s nuclear energy plant.
However, Israel also struck a university associated with the nuclear program as well as twelve missile sites, including Kermanshah, Bid Kaneh, Tabriz, Shiraz, and Piranshahr. The bombing campaign has also hit a military airport, a state-owned television broadcaster, and a prison. Over the weekend, Israel also attacked some of Iran’s critical energy infrastructure, including Tehran’s central gas depot, its oil refinery, and the South Pars, one of the world’s largest gas fields.
Altogether, more than six hundred people in Iran have been killed so far, and thousands more injured, according to Iran’s health ministry. Iran has responded with its own missile attacks on Israel, killing twenty-eight people there.
Scientists
Israel has a history of targeting Iranian scientists, and it has killed at least ten in these latest attacks. Fereydoon Abbasi, the former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, and Amir Hossein Feqhi, the organization’s former deputy head, were both killed. Nuclear faculty members at Shahid Beheshti University—Ahmadreza Zolfaghari, Abolhamid Minouchehr, and Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi—were also among the dead. At least seventeen senior security figureheads were also killed in Israel’s attacks.
“The loss of scientists can be a huge problem for Iran, if Israel is targeting the right ones—people with significant knowledge and experience,” Elliott Abrams, CFR senior fellow for Middle East Studies, says. “It’s hard to believe the program and the associated knowledge can be put to an end this way, but certainly the program can be delayed and undermined.”
Nuclear Fallout
There are roughly four hundred kilograms of enriched uranium located at facilities across Iran, and a strike on one of these targets could cause radiation levels harmful to the local population—though the severity of the disaster would depend on what kind of facility is ultimately hit and where it is located, according to CFR’s nuclear security expert, Erin D. Dumbacher.
Governments in the region, including Qatar’s, have voiced concern about the risk of strikes inadvertently igniting an explosion that spreads nuclear material further afield. The greatest risk of this would be if attacks struck a nuclear reactor (Bushehr or the Tehran Nuclear Research Center, which has a small research reactor).
“If the Bushehr site’s power source was affected, it could lead to forced evacuations like we saw after the Fukushima accident in Japan or food restrictions like Europe managed after Chernobyl to protect the health of residents for miles,” Dumbacher says.
Nuclear experts maintain, however, that attacks on Iran’s buried enrichment centers have a low risk of triggering radiation exposure. Both the IAEA and Iran’s neighbor, Saudi Arabia, had also reported that there has not been a discernible uptick in radiation levels since the U.S. attack on Saturday. There remain some concerns that uranium hexafluoride gas could come into contact with water and produce hydrofluoric acid, a highly potent chemical hazard. Workers in the area would be the most at risk of being affected by the toxic chemicals.
The hunt for the four hundred kilograms of enriched uranium continues in the aftermath of the U.S. and Israeli strikes. U.S. and international officials said they were unsure what became of them, so the question remains whether the attack destroyed the Iranian nuclear program, or just forced it into smaller, more secretive pockets of Iran’s web of thirty-odd nuclear sites. The same U.S. intelligence report said that Iran had moved most of its stockpile before Midnight Hammer, leaving most of it undamaged. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had “interesting intel” on its whereabouts, but did not elaborate.
And another kind of blowback could prove damaging to nonproliferation efforts by raising doubts among non-nuclear weapons states, Dumbacher says. “They might conclude that international transparency into their nuclear programs is of no consequence to a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council like the United States and only brings risks they’re not willing to take,” she adds.
Iran’s Response
As Iran has retaliated with strikes of its own on Israel, U.S. President Donald Trump in the days leading up to the U.S. overnight operation called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender.” He threatened to strike Iran if its leaders did not advance the protracted nuclear talks to cease uranium enrichment, and he encouraged them to return to negotiations after the U.S. attack. “We are at the precipice of, potentially, a conflict with Iran,” CFR Middle East expert Steven A. Cook says.
Iran has quickly condemned the U.S. strike, calling for a special UN Security Council session. It also said that it “reserves all options” to retaliate against what Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization has called a “barbaric violation” of international law. A military response against U.S. bases and service members in the region could pose great risks of escalation, experts said.
“Iranian attacks on U.S. bases would first of all be attacks on their neighbors, such as Qatar, the UAE, and Bahrain. More importantly, were they to kill American soldiers or sailors this way, one can imagine that the U.S. reaction would be fierce and would threaten the survival of the regime,” Abrams tells CFR.
Many security experts, including officials at the Department of Homeland Security, believe that Iran could resort to asymmetric methods. These include terrorist or cyber attacks, given that Israel has significantly reduced the IRGC’s military capabilities.
Iran’s parliament has also endorsed closing off the Strait of Hormuz, a vital passageway for oil and other goods, sending the global markets bracing for potentially ensuing economic ripples. That decision ultimately rests with Iran’s Supreme Council.
“Can the regime effectively mount a retaliation against American forces and bases and diplomatic facilities throughout the Middle East, of which there are many? I think the way in which the Iranians respond—if they can—will tell us a lot about the strength of the regime,” Cook says.
Will Merrow and Michael Bricknell created the map for this article.
