(NewsNation) — U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Sunday that U.S. military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities were a success that obliterated Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.
The U.S. strikes included 14 bunker-buster bombs, more than two dozen Tomahawk missiles and over 125 military aircraft, in an operation the top U.S. general, General Dan Caine, said was named “Operation Midnight.”
The operation pushes the Middle East to the brink of a major new conflagration in a region already aflame for more than 20 months with wars in Gaza and Lebanon and a toppled dictator in Syria.
“Iran’s nuclear ambitions have been obliterated,” Hegseth told reporters in a briefing, adding that said the strikes did not target Iranian troops or people.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said the time for diplomacy had passed and that his country had the right to defend itself, saying the U.S. had “crossed a very big red line.”
“The warmongering, a lawless administration in Washington is solely and fully responsible for the dangerous consequences and far reaching implications of its act of aggression,” he said at a news briefing at a conference in Turkey in the first comments by a high-ranking Iranian official since the strikes.
Araghchi also said that “there is no red line” that the U.S. has not crossed — and that “the most dangerous one was what happened only last night when they crossed a very big red line by attacking nuclear facilities only.”
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