On Saturday, "Operation Midnight" involving about 125 U.S. aircraft including seven B-2 stealth bombers each carrying two 30,000 pound "bunker buster bombs" along with about 30 submarine-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles eradicated Iran's near-term ability to execute repeated "Death to America, Death to Israel" threats issued throughout the 35-year reign of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The overall mission was remarkably ambitious in complexity, effective in strategic deception, and successful in execution, with no American casualties and none currently known for Iran at the time of this writing.
Shortly after midnight Eastern time, a total 13 B-2 stealth bombers took off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, of which six were sent to the Pacific Island of Guam as decoys, while seven proceeded east to Iran with fighter jets scouting the airspace ahead of them for possible enemy aircraft and surface-to-air missiles.
Shortly after 2 a.m. Iran time, all of the seven B-2 bombers released their massive payloads on two key underground nuclear weapon enrichment sites: six dropping a total 12 deeply penetrating bombs on a Fordow mountain site, and one releasing two on Natanz.
Due to travel time required, the Tomahawk missiles fired from a submarine 400 miles away didn't reach the third Iran target site at Isfahan until after all B-2s were leaving Iran airspace. These bombers were returning from their more than 15-hour nonstop round-trip flights around the world, a journey that required refueling from dozens of aerial tankers.
The devastatingly impactful U.S. actions followed earlier highly damaging Israeli attacks on the facilities along with Iran missile launching and aerial defense assets which commenced a day after President Donald Trump's 60-day deadline for a regime agreement to end their nuclear weapons program, and two days after he gave them a second ultimatum to negotiate or face dire consequences within two weeks.
This following decades of efforts by Iran mullahs to hide nuclear warfare ambitions behind a fig leaf cover of uranium enrichment for peaceful domestic energy purposes.
Initially slow-moving, the Iran nuclear program became a major priority called AMAD after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003. Fearing that they might come next under scrutiny from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that a secret Natanz uranium enrichment plant was discovered.
So, Tehran shifted — or camouflaged — their focus to embark on a clandestine high-enrichment Al-Ghadir project at Fordow, lamely claiming that their leadership hadn't authorized use for weaponry purposes.
According to David Albright, a former IAEA inspector who served in Iraq in 1991, the international watchdog organization readily bought the ruse that Tehran had halted its nuclear weapons program.
According to Albright, the most recent iteration of this dogma came this March, when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard testified to Congress that the intel community "continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader [Ali] Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear program he suspended in 2003."
Iran's leadership regime has actively engaged in deceptive practices to avoid sanctions on uranium enrichment subject to a 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) championed by Obama and Biden administrations by restricting IAEA inspection access to sensitive sites while continuing to escape penalties for doing so.
We have since learned that in 2018 the Israelis stole an Iran archive revealing that Obama's JCPOA appeasement deal offered Iran sanctions relief on nuclear activity limits in exchange for an agreement to cut back their program for 10 years, after which they could "rebuild the whole thing again."
Israel hated the deal, and for good reason. Iran has gone from not being able to make weapon-grade uranium at end of the AMAD plan to being able to make it in days.
Trump despised it too. He pulled out of JCPOA in 2018 charging that "the Iran Deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into."
The domestic energy fig leaf dropped entirely when IAEA released a May 31 report revealing that Iran had amassed 900.8 pounds of uranium enriched up to 60%, a purity level that accounts for about 99% of the total effort required to rapidly sprint within weeks towards 90% purity needed for weapons-grade material.
Whereas projections vary, Albright, who now heads the nonpartisan, nonprofit Institute for Science and International Security, estimates that prior to recent Israeli and U.S. attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, Iran had enough highly enriched material to build 11 nuclear warheads within a month and twice as many within 5 months.
Although it would have taken longer for Iran to develop nuclear warheads that are deliverable by their current 500–800-mile range Shahab-3 liquid fuel missiles, they were known to be developing many of the essential components including the fissile uranium metal, neutron initiators and multipoint detonators.
Now that most or all those capabilities and materials are gone — along with an estimated two-thirds of Iran's missile delivery systems, no one can predict how Iran's weakened yet apocalyptically death cult disposed leadership will respond other than to expect it won't be peaceful.
For example, we shouldn't be too surprised to witness Iran proxy attacks on U.S. bases and citizens in the region yet perhaps meanwhile be grateful that they won't involve nuclear warheads any time soon.
Those who currently decry these time-critical U.S. actions against atomic weapons in the hands of ideological tyrants as unwarranted provocations of war might also contemplate an inherent contradiction of logic.
There is no such contradiction in exercising peace through strength against those who are hell-bent upon killing us.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.