‘Operation Midnight Hammer’ Details: How Iran’s Nuclear Sites Were Struck
The United States military on Sunday revealed the intricate details of its massive aerial assault on Iran’s key nuclear facilities, a 25-minute operation codenamed ‘Operation Midnight Hammer’ that involved B-2 stealth bombers, a sophisticated decoy maneuver, and the first-ever use of 30,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs.
In a detailed briefing at the White House, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Caine, laid out how the US struck deep into Iran on Saturday, targeting the heavily fortified nuclear sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan with overwhelming and undetected force.
To ensure total tactical surprise, the mission began with a complex deception. “At midnight Friday into Saturday morning, a large B-2 strike package comprised of bombers launched from the continental US,” General Caine explained. “As part of a plan to maintain tactical surprise, a part of the package proceeded to the west and into the Pacific as a decoy… an effort known only to an extremely small number of planners.”
While the decoy group flew west, the main strike package of seven B-2 Spirit bombers flew an 18-hour mission east towards Iran, one of the longest B-2 missions since 2001.
The attack itself was executed with precision timing. At around 5 pm Eastern Time (ET), a US submarine launched over two dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles at surface infrastructure at the Isfahan nuclear site. This was followed by the main event.
At 6:40 pm ET, the lead B-2 bomber dropped two GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators (MOPs)—colossal 30,000-pound “bunker-buster” bombs designed to destroy deeply buried targets—on the Fordow facility, which is built into a mountain. “The remaining bombers then hit their targets,” Caine said. In total, 14 MOPs were dropped on Fordow and Natanz.
The entire strike force, involving more than 125 aircraft including fighters and tankers, was out of Iranian airspace by 7:05 pm ET. General Caine confirmed that Iranian air defenses were completely bypassed. “No shots were fired by Iran at the US on the way in or out… It appears that Iran’s surface-to-air missile systems did not see us,” he stated.
The detailed briefing came a day after US President Donald Trump declared the mission a “spectacular military success” that had “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities. The US attack prompted swift retaliatory ballistic missile strikes from Iran on Israel, dramatically escalating the ongoing conflict in West Asia.
