Iran admitted stockpiling uranium for 11 nukes before Trump struck
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President Donald Trump did not start this war. The Islamic Republic did this on November 4, 1979, when it invaded the US Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. For nearly half a century, the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism has killed and maimed more Americans than any other terrorist regime in the world. He even planned to assassinate Trump twice.
The regime’s attacks on the United States and our allies are not a series of isolated incidents, but a single, continuous war that the mullahs have waged for 47 years. From the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing to Iranian IEDs that killed 603 Americans in Iraq (roughly one in every six American war deaths), the regime operated under the assumption that Washington did not have the stomach to respond. For years, this bet paid off. Tehran interpreted the restriction as permission, not prudence.
From Hamas’s massacre of nearly 1,200 people, including 46 Americans, on October 7 to more than 180 attacks on U.S. forces last year, the regime has always told us what it wants: Death to America.
To counter this looming threat, every American president since Jimmy Carter has chosen to scrap it by calling it diplomacy. This changed in 2020 when Trump ordered an attack on the regime’s top terrorist and IED mastermind, Qasem Soleimani. Washington’s foreign policy class criticized this, but the Iranian people celebrated it.
MICHAEL OREN: IRAN HAS BEEN Waging WAR AGAINST AMERICA FOR 47 YEARS – IT’S TIME TO END IT
In this U.S. Navy release, USS Thomas Hudner fires a Tomahawk land attack missile in support of Operation Epic Fury at sea, March 1, 2026. (via US Navy/Getty Images)
When the regime massacred more than 40,000 protesters in January 2026 and attempted to hide the atrocities from the world by shutting down the internet, the public again turned to Trump for help. He answered their calls by doing what his predecessors had never dared to do: taking action to “put an end once and for all to this long-standing danger.”
The case for action was strong. Beyond humanitarian grounds, US special envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff revealed details of his and Special Peace Envoy Jared Kushner’s negotiations that led to the conflict. Their Iranian counterparts proudly admitted that they had stockpiled enough uranium for 11 nuclear bombs that could be obtained within weeks. When the United States offered to provide Iran with nuclear fuel for free in exchange for stopping enrichment, Tehran refused. Witkoff concluded that Iran had no intention other than to weaponize its stockpiles.
This nuclear threat was built on decades of deception. The regime hid the tubes from IAEA inspectors so it could secretly restore the Arak reactor. He concealed his entire nuclear weapons archive from negotiators (later seized by Israel), then stonewalled international investigators investigating undeclared nuclear materials and activities at multiple sites.
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The Obama Administration’s deeply flawed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) did not constrain the Islamic Republic. Instead, it legitimized and financed Iran’s gradual pursuit of nuclear weapons. Trump correctly called the JCPOA “the worst deal ever negotiated.” It withdrew from the agreement in 2018, launching a maximum pressure campaign, depriving the regime of more than $200 billion in oil revenues that would otherwise fund terrorist operations.
President Joe Biden inexplicably abandoned the strategy, giving Iran breathing room to accelerate enrichment — until Trump struck the regime’s nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan during Operation Midnight Hammer last June. Trump launched Operation Epic Rage, as Iran’s negotiators boasted about their bomb-ready stockpile and told Witkoff, “We won’t give you diplomatically what you can’t get militarily.”
The objectives of the operation, which embodied Trump’s “peace through force” doctrine, were laid out by the War Department: to destroy Iran’s offensive ballistic missiles and production facilities, destroy its navy and naval infrastructure, disrupt terrorist proxy networks, prevent nuclear weapons development by targeting relevant areas, and weaken the regime’s security apparatus, including Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) command centers, air defenses, missile and drone launchers, and airfields.
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So far the results are ahead of schedule. The regime’s leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed along with his inner circle and senior military commanders in a joint operation with Israel; these included the heads of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij and top power broker Ali Larijani.
More than 80 percent of Iran’s ballistic missile stockpile and production capacity, as well as most of its naval fleet and port infrastructure, were destroyed. Iran’s proxy financing networks—the pipelines that keep Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas armed and running—have been cut. Nuclear-related sites were destroyed throughout the country. At least 49 senior regime officials were killed or removed from the battlefield.
Their Iranian counterparts proudly admitted that they had stockpiled enough uranium for 11 nuclear bombs that could be obtained within weeks.
This unprecedented breakdown in the regime’s repressive powers is leveling the battlefield and creating unprecedented conditions in the streets for the Iranian people to rise up and directly challenge the mullahs.
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The job isn’t over yet. But it’s going well. Staying the course will end it.
President Trump addressed the Iranian people directly in his speech when launching the operation: “[T]The hour of your freedom is approaching… When we are done, take over your government. It will be yours to take.” That moment is now available.
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Smoke and flames rise from an air attack on an oil depot in Tehran on March 7, 2026. (Sasan / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images)
Trump’s strategy is working. His legs don’t wobble and his resolve remains unwavering: “We don’t want to leave early, do we? … We don’t want to come back every couple of years.” Half-baked measures against this regime have a 47-year history of failure. History will confirm Trump’s determination to end this.
As the leader of Iran’s democratic opposition, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, put it: Donald Trump will be remembered as the leader who stood with the Iranian people at the most crucial moments, alongside history’s greatest liberators.
