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Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Sunday that America “does not seek war” with Iran in the aftermath of a surprise attack overnight on three of that country’s nuclear sites while Vice President JD Vance said the strikes have given Tehran a renewed chance of negotiating with Washington.
The mission, called “Operation Midnight Hammer,” involved decoys and deception, and met with no Iranian resistance, Hegseth and Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Pentagon news conference.
“This mission was not and has not been about regime change,” Hegseth added.
Caine said the goal of the operation — destroying nuclear sites in Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan — had been achieved.
“Final battle damage will take some time, but initial battle damage assessments indicate that all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction,” Caine said.
Vance said in a television interview that while he would not discuss “sensitive intelligence about what we’ve seen on the ground,” he felt “very confident that we’ve substantially delayed their development of a nuclear weapon.”
Pressed further, he told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “I think that we have really pushed their program back by a very long time. I think that it’s going to be many many years before the Iranians are able to develop a nuclear weapon.”
The vice president said the U.S. had “negotiated aggressively’ with Iran to try to find a peaceful settlement and that Trump made his decision after assessing the Iranians were not acting “in good faith.”
“I actually think it provides an opportunity to reset this relationship, reset these negotiations and get us in a place where Iran can decide not to be a threat to its neighbors, not to a threat to the United States and if they’re willing to do that, the United States is all ears,” Vance said.
