Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service, coming to you live from London.

I'm James Kimmer-Sami.

In the end, he didn't wait for two weeks.

He didn't even wait for two days.

After appearing to give diplomacy a chance on Friday to step back from the brink of military action, Donald Trump

ordered attacks on three Iranian nuclear sites overnight, using Tomahawk cruise missiles

and so-called bunker-busting bombs. A long-time skeptic of American involvement in foreign wars,

elected in part because he'd opposed past U.S. entanglement in the Middle East, the second Trump

term will now be bound up with this choice, a choice that may have dealt a decisive blow to Iran's

nuclear program, removing a source of global instability, or to have made the world a far less

stable place. Whichever it is, and that might not be clear for some time,

there is no doubting how consequential this decision is,

for the Trump presidency, for the region and beyond.

We'll be devoting almost the entire programme

to the events in Iran,

trying to establish what we know about the timing

and the success of the

U.S. operation and we'll get plenty of reaction to it. Let's begin, though, with the moment the U.S.

Commander-in-Chief, flanked by his Vice President, Secretary of State and Defense Secretary,

told the world what he had commanded American forces to do.

A short time ago, the U.S. military carried out massive precision strikes

on the three key nuclear facilities in the Iranian regime, Fordot, Natanz, and Esfahan.

...