In his State of the Union address on February 24, President Donald Trump framed Iran’s nuclear activities as a renewed threat that the United States had previously crushed but may need to confront again. 

“We wiped it out, and they want to start all over again,” Trump said of Iran’s nuclear program, accusing Tehran of “again pursuing their sinister ambitions” following last June’s Operation Midnight Hammer strikes. “We are in negotiations with them. They want to make a deal, but we haven’t heard those secret words: ‘We will never have a nuclear weapon.’ My preference is to solve this problem through diplomacy. But one thing is certain: I will never allow the world’s number one sponsor of terror, which they are by far, to have a nuclear weapon. Can’t let that happen.”

Two U.S. carrier strike groups—the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford—are now operating within striking distance of Iran, alongside a surge of land‑ and sea‑based airpower that includes long‑range bombers, additional fighter squadrons, and supporting tanker and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance aircraft forward‑deployed across the region. The White House has been told that the U.S. military could be ready to launch strikes within days. Yet what stands out at this moment is not the impressive scale of the buildup so much as its limits: even a major campaign of air and naval strikes can only damage known facilities and infrastructure, while many of the current nuclear challenges posed by Iran—its accumulated expertise, dispersed capabilities, and political resolve—lie beyond what military force alone can decisively settle.

The June 22, 2025, strikes were genuinely consequential. Seven B-2 bombers flew from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, refueling three times over eighteen hours, before dropping heavy bunker-busters on Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan, preceded into Iranian airspace by F-22s and F-35s to suppress air defenses. Key nodes eliminated included four centrifuge manufacturing and testing plants, the conversion and metal labs, the enrichment plants, and weaponization sites, along with associated equipment, documentation, and scientists. Israel’s preceding Operation Rising Lion had already targeted top military commanders and nuclear scientists. Iran’s ability to enrich uranium was disrupted, advanced centrifuge production was degraded, and the most visible fixed targets were largely destroyed. The Pentagon assessed that the program had been set back by one to two years—closer to two.

But the strikes did not resolve the nuclear question. They opened an accountability gap that additional bombing cannot close. The unknowns fall into three categories.

The first is the International Atomic Energy Agency’s access to Iranian nuclear facilities and accountability for nuclear material. No inspector has been inside any of the targeted facilities since last June 13, compounding an erosion in transparency that began in 2021 with the suspension of the Additional Protocol. The condition of those facilities, the status of equipment within them, and whether nuclear material has been transferred elsewhere are all unverifiable. Iran’s roughly 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium remain unaccounted for, likely entombed within the Fordow and Isfahan tunnel complexes whose entrances have since been buried or backfilled.

The second is the scope of surviving and reconstituted infrastructure. Whether centrifuge components were evacuated before the U.S. strikes is unknown. Moreover, the pace of reconstitution implies more equipment survived than official assessments allow, possibly because it was moved underground beforehand. At certain sites, hardening is accelerating: Pickaxe Mountain, south of Natanz, is undergoing rapid underground construction, and Taleghan 2 at Parchin is being encased in concrete and covered with soil.

The third is the question of undeclared capacity. The strikes destroyed declared infrastructure, but longstanding questions about whether Iran maintained parallel enrichment activity outside IAEA oversight were not resolved by Midnight Hammer and remain open. There is no confirmed evidence of an active covert program. It is also worth noting that Iran’s only known viable enrichment route runs through centrifuge cascades—it does not possess laser isotope separation technology, which would be considerably harder to detect—meaning that reconstitution at meaningful scale would produce signatures that intelligence agencies are equipped to monitor. The concern is real but not unconstrained.

This brings us to the central mismatch. If the objectives of renewed military action were limited strictly to Pickaxe Mountain, Taleghan 2, and residual nuclear infrastructure, the current force posture in the Persian Gulf is disproportionate to that mission. The buildup is sized for something considerably larger, and the administration’s own public statements confirm it. Trump has cited Iran’s ballistic missile program, its domestic crackdown on protesters, and its nuclear activities as intertwined justifications. Any campaign aimed at meaningfully constraining Iranian military capacity would have to address launch bases, transporter-erector-launcher networks, production facilities, and sustainment nodes. The nuclear file is the stated rationale. However, it is probably not the full picture.  Taken together, the nuclear justification may be functioning less as a narrowly defined operational objective and more as a politically legible frame for a broader effort to degrade Iranian capabilities—chiefly its ballistic missiles.

The core tension remains this: the nuclear problem that survives is one that military strikes are increasingly poorly suited to resolve. The material accountability problem at Isfahan and Fordow requires a diplomatic or inspection-based solution. Bombs cannot produce verified inventories. Whether the administration has genuinely exhausted diplomacy, or whether the force buildup is itself a coercive instrument designed to change Iranian calculus at the negotiating table, is the essential question that will determine what comes next. What is clear is that the objectives now being discussed extend well beyond the nuclear file, and the costs and risks of what follows deserve far more public scrutiny than they are currently receiving.