Eleven nights in a row. Whatever you thought about the prospects of a diplomatic resolution, the relentless rhythm of US strikes on Iran is making it increasingly hard to imagine one.
American forces launched fresh attacks overnight, continuing what has become the longest sustained US military campaign against Iran in history. The strikes have targeted missile production facilities, command infrastructure, and air defence systems across the country, according to Pentagon briefings.
But it was Donald Trump’s latest threat that sent analysts scrambling. The US president warned, via Truth Social, that he was prepared to strike Fordow, the deeply buried Iranian nuclear enrichment facility carved into a mountain near Qom. It’s the kind of site that conventional munitions simply can’t reach. Only the US military’s most powerful bunker-busting bomb, the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, is thought capable of doing meaningful damage.
“Fordow is not just a facility, it’s a symbol,” one former senior NATO official told reporters this week. “Hitting it would change the entire calculus of this conflict.”
Iran has, predictably, refused to back down. Supreme Leader Khamenei’s office issued a statement calling the strikes “acts of desperation” and vowing that the country’s nuclear programme would continue regardless. Tehran has also warned that any attack on Fordow would constitute a “red line” crossing with consequences it didn’t specify, though the implication was clear enough.
The diplomatic picture is complicated further by the fact that talks between Iranian and American negotiators, held just weeks ago in Oman, now appear to be completely off the table. Three rounds of discussions, all of which were described cautiously as “productive” by both sides, have amounted to nothing.
Back in Westminster, Foreign Secretary David Lammy reiterated Britain’s call for “restraint on all sides,” a phrase that satisfies nobody but commits the government to nothing. British naval assets in the region remain on heightened alert.
The real question now isn’t whether Trump will order the Fordow strike; it’s whether Iran has anything left it’s willing to offer to prevent it. And increasingly, there’s little sign that either side is in the mood to find out.
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