Donald Trump used twelve enormous 30,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs to “completely obliterate” Iran’s top-secret Fordow nuclear complex.
Thirty Tomahawk missiles fired from American submarines 400 miles away also “wiped out” two additional nuclear sites in Iran.
Sean Hannity of Fox News, who interviewed the president soon after the strikes, was the first to disclose the information.
Hannity continued, “Trump officials told me that Fordow was ‘gone.’”
A U.S. military official later verified the scope of the destructive bombing mission, implying that Fordow had been “taken off the table.”
It had previously been proposed that the location might be destroyed with just two bunker busters.
The bunker busters were delivered by a dozen B-2 stealth bombers.
Israel claimed that their attack had already rendered Iran’s air defences inoperable, enabling them to destroy several Iranian nuclear installations.
However, Israel requested the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), an American bomb that can blow up bunkers, from Trump in order to attack the Fordow nuclear fuel enrichment site.
The gadget reaches deeply buried targets by using its weight and kinetic force, after which it explodes.
The B-2 stealth bomber, which is unique to the American arsenal, must deliver it.
This was the first time the bomb had ever been deployed in battle.
The U.S. Air Force claims it is precision-guided and built to strike tunnels and deeply buried, reinforced bunkers.
According to military experts, it can go 200 feet or so below the surface before detonating.
With each subsequent detonation, the bombs can be dropped one after the other, effectively boring further and deeper into the earth.
The B-2 stealth bombers took off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri on Saturday morning and flew for approximately 37 hours without stopping, refuelling multiple times.
Only the Air Force can fly the B-2, which is made by Northrop Grumman and can carry nuclear weapons.
Since each aircraft costs over $1 billion, the U.S. military hardly ever uses it in combat. It was first employed in the Kosovo War in 1999.
The strategic heavy bomber can reach any location in the world in a matter of hours and has a range of roughly 7,000 miles without refuelling and 11,500 miles with one refill.
The military employed the war plane to fight Yemen’s Houthi rebels and their subterranean bunkers in October of last year, before the attack in Iran. It has also dropped bombs in Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
What kinds of bombs were dropped was not immediately made clear by Trump. The Pentagon and White House did not immediately provide more details about the operation.
Iran has threatened to strike back if the United States joined the Israeli attack.
Trump had earlier said that he would decide in the next two weeks whether or not to bomb Fordow.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, forewarned the United States on Wednesday that any strikes against the Islamic Republic would cause “irreparable damage” to the United States.
Esmail Baghaei, a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, said that “any American intervention would be a recipe for an all-out war in the region.”
Trump has been adamant about preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
At first, he had thought that the country’s authorities would agree to quietly abandon its nuclear program in exchange for the threat of force.