President Trump is weighing a critical decision in the four-day-old war between Israel and Iran: whether to enter the fray by helping Israel destroy the deeply buried nuclear enrichment facility at Fordo, which only American “bunker busters,” dropped by American B-2 bombers, can reach.
If he decides to go ahead, the United States will become a direct participant in a new conflict in the Middle East, taking on Iran in exactly the kind of war Mr. Trump has sworn, in two campaigns, he would avoid. Iranian officials have already warned that U.S. participation in an attack on its facilities will imperil any remaining chance of the nuclear disarmament deal that Mr. Trump insists he is still interested in pursuing.
Mr. Trump has encouraged Vice President JD Vance and his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, to offer to meet the Iranians this week, according to a U.S. official. The offer may be well received.
Mr. Trump, at the Group of 7 summit in Canada, said late on Monday, “I think Iran basically is at the negotiating table, they want to make a deal.”
If such a meeting happened, officials say, the likely Iranian interlocutor would be the country’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, who played a key role in the 2015 nuclear deal with the Obama administration and knows every element of Iran’s sprawling nuclear complex. Mr. Araghchi, who has been Mr. Witkoff’s counterpart in recent negotiations, signaled his openness to a deal on Monday, saying in a statement, “If President Trump is genuine about diplomacy and interested in stopping this war, next steps are consequential.”
“It takes one phone call from Washington to muzzle someone like Netanyahu,” he said, referring to the Israeli prime minister. “That may pave the way for a return to diplomacy.”
But if that diplomatic effort fizzles, or the Iranians remain unwilling to give in to Mr. Trump’s central demand that they must ultimately end all uranium enrichment on Iranian soil, the president will still have the option of ordering that Fordo and other nuclear facilities be destroyed.
There is only one weapon for the job, experts contend. It is called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or the GBU-57, and it weighs so much — 30,000 pounds — that it can be lifted only by a B-2 bomber. Israel does not own either the weapon or the bomber needed to get it aloft and over target.
If Mr. Trump holds back, it could well mean that Israel’s main objective in the war is never completed.
“Fordo has always been the crux of this thing,” said Brett McGurk, who worked on Middle East issues for four successive American presidents, from George W. Bush to Joseph R. Biden Jr. “If this ends with Fordo still enriching, then it’s not a strategic gain.”
That has been true for a long time, and over the past two years the U.S. military has refined the operation, under close White House scrutiny. The exercises led to the conclusion that one bomb would not solve the problem; any attack on Fordo would have to come in waves, with B-2s releasing one bomb after another down the same hole. And the operation would have to be executed by an American pilot and crew.
This was all in the world of war planning until the opening salvos on Friday morning in Tehran, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the strikes, declaring that Israel had discovered an “imminent” threat that required “pre-emptive action.” New intelligence, he suggested without describing the details, indicated that Iran was on the cusp of turning its fuel stockpile into weapons.
U.S. intelligence officials who have followed the Iranian program for years agree that Iranian scientists and nuclear specialists have been working to shorten the time it would take to manufacture a nuclear bomb, but they saw no huge breakthroughs.
Yet they agree with Mr. McGurk and other experts on one point: If the Fordo facility survives the conflict, Iran will retain the key equipment it needs to stay on a pathway to the bomb, even if it would first have to rebuild much of the nuclear infrastructure that Israel has left in ruins over four days of precision bombing.
There may be other alternatives to bombing it, though they are hardly a sure thing. If the power to Fordo gets cut, by saboteurs or bombing, it could damage or destroy the centrifuges that spin at supersonic speeds. Rafael Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said on Monday that this might have happened at the country’s other major uranium enrichment center, Natanz. Israel took out the power supplies to the plant on Friday, and Mr. Grossi said that the disruption probably sent them spinning out of control.
Mr. Trump rarely talks about Fordo by name, but he has occasionally alluded to the weapon, sometimes telling aides that he ordered its development. That is not correct: The United States began designing the weapon in 2004, during the Bush administration, specifically to collapse the mountains protecting some of the deepest nuclear facilities in Iran and North Korea. It was, however, tested during Mr. Trump’s first term, and added to the arsenal.
Mr. Netanyahu has pressed for the United States to make its bunker busters available since the Bush administration, so far to no avail. But people who have spoken to Mr. Trump in recent months say the topic has come up repeatedly in his conversations with the prime minister. When Mr. Trump has been asked about it, he usually avoids a direct answer.
Now the pressure is on. The Israeli former defense minister Yoav Gallant, who resigned in a split with Mr. Netanyahu, told CNN’s Bianna Golodryga on Monday that “the job has to be done, by Israel, by the United States,” an apparent reference to the fact that the bomb would have to be dropped by an American pilot in an American airplane. He said that Mr. Trump had “the option to change the Middle East and influence the world.”
And Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican from South Carolina who often speaks for the traditional, hawkish members of his party, said on CBS on Sunday that “if diplomacy is not successful” he will “urge President Trump to go all in to make sure that, when this operation is over, there’s nothing left standing in Iran regarding their nuclear program.”
“If that means providing bombs, provide bombs,” he said, adding, in a clear reference to the Massive Ordinance Penetrator, “whatever bombs. If it means flying with Israel, fly with Israel.”
But Republicans are hardly united in that view. And the split in the party over the decision of whether to make use of one of the Pentagon’s most powerful conventional weapons to help one of America’s closest allies has highlighted a far deeper divide. It is not only about crippling the centrifuges of Fordo; it is also about MAGA’s view of what kinds of wars the United States should avoid at all costs.
The anti-interventionist wing of the party, given its most prominent voice by the influential podcaster Tucker Carlson, has argued that the lesson of Iraq and Afghanistan is that there is nothing but downside risk in getting deeply into another Middle East war. On Friday, Mr. Carlson wrote that the United States should “drop Israel” and “let them fight their own wars.”
“If Israel wants to wage this war, it has every right to do so,” he continued. “It is a sovereign country, and it can do as it pleases. But not with America’s backing.”
In the Pentagon, opinion is divided for other reasons. Elbridge A. Colby, the under secretary of defense for policy, the Pentagon’s No. 3 post, has long argued that every military asset devoted to the wars of the Middle East is one diverted from the Pacific and the containment of China. (Mr. Colby had to amend his views on Iran somewhat to get confirmed.)
For now, Mr. Trump can afford to keep one foot in both camps. By making one more run at coercive diplomacy, he can make the case to the MAGA faithful that he is using the threat of the Massive Ordnance Penetrator to bring the conflict to a peaceful end. And he can tell the Iranians that they are going to cease enriching uranium one way or the other, either by diplomatic agreement or because a GBU-57 imploded the mountain.
But if the combination of persuasion and coercion fails, he will have to decide whether this is Israel’s war or America’s.
Reporting was contributed by Farnaz Fassihi in New York and Patrick Kingsley in Jerusalem.
David E. Sanger covers the Trump administration and a range of national security issues. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written four books on foreign policy and national security challenges.
Jonathan Swan is a White House reporter for The Times, covering the administration of Donald J. Trump. Contact him securely on Signal: @jonathan.941
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