David Sanger, it is 10.45 p.m. on Thursday night, and just as we were finishing Friday's episode

of the Daily, we got this major news out of the Middle East, and we wanted to bring it to our

listeners at the top of this episode. You cover the White House for the times, but really you cover

the entire world, especially the Middle East.

Can you describe the extent of this attack we're just getting word of by Israel on Iran and

the significance of it?

Well, the extent appears to be much larger than we had really expected.

They went after the leadership of the Iranian military and appeared to have killed their top military commander. They went after the nuclear

scientists. And perhaps most importantly, Michael, they went after the heart and soul of the Iranian nuclear program,

a facility called Natanz, where for two decades Iran has made most of its nuclear material,

the fuel that you could use for commercial power plants, which they maintained was their purpose,

or for nuclear weapons.

And we just don't know at this point how much of that program has been destroyed.

In terms of Israel's past aggressions toward Iran, where does this stack up?

It is by far the largest.

In the past, they have assassinated individual scientists and generals.

They put sticky bombs on their cars as they were driving to work in Tehran traffic. They have sabotaged individual facilities.

The United States and Israel together put together the world's

most sophisticated cyber weapon to take those centrifuges that produce uranium and make them spin out

of control. What they never did before was bomb the facilities themselves and basically risk a regional war in order to stop

the program.

So we're witnessing history here.

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