
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that Sunday’s aerial raid on Iran — Operation Midnight Hammer — was the culmination of a secret project that traces to 2009 and a small team within the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency who spent the ensuing years studying Tehran’s construction of an underground lair to enrich uranium — and how the U.S. military might strike the facility should Iran attain the ability to develop a nuclear weapon.
“You do not build a multilayered underground bunker complex with centrifuges and other equipment in a mountain for any peaceful purpose,” Caine said.
That team’s 15 years of work laid the foundation, he said, for this past weekend’s operation in which six B-2 stealth bombers, under the cover of darkness, each dropped two 30,000-pound bunker-busting rounds on the Fordow nuclear enrichment facility. The first bomb “forcibly removed” a concrete cap Iranian officials had used to try to shield the complex from an attack, with the next 11 falling precisely down mountaintop vents to maximize destruction inside, he explained. A seventh B-2 carrying two additional bombs flew with the other six in case it was needed, and later dropped the ordnance on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility before returning home to Missouri with the other aircraft that participated.
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