For those who don't realize this was in the making for many years, this article explainsWORLD: Operation Midnight Hammer
July 25, 2025
Smackdown in Iran
‘15 years of incredible work’—the inside story of Operation Midnight Hammer.
By Chris Gordon
The 36-hour operation to fly deep into Iranian airspace in June and destroy three heavily fortified nuclear complexes began more than 15 years ago with the discovery of a major construction complex among the remote mountains of northwest Iran.
It ended June 22 with the homecoming of seven B-2 Spirit bombers—more than a third of the entire fleet—which had delivered without incident 14 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrators on Iran’s three nuclear sites. The U.S. began grappling with the challenge of how to destroy the Fordow mountain complex after Iran began building it in 2006. An analyst at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) was first shown the photos of the site and started work on how to counter it three years later. DTRA is a little-known agency headquartered at Fort Belvoir, Va., a short drive from the Pentagon, with the mission to counter weapons of mass destruction.
“For more than 15 years, this officer and his teammate lived and breathed this single target: Fordow, a critical element of Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine. “He watched the Iranians dig it out. He watched the construction, the weather, the discarded material, the geology, the construction materials, where the materials came from. He looked at the vent shaft, the exhaust shaft, the electrical systems, the environmental control systems—every nook, every crater, every piece of equipment going in, and every piece of equipment going out.”
The task was painstaking, with no guarantee the U.S. would ever decide to act on the knowledge.
“We have some incredibly gifted and smart people within the DTRA agency … if you watch “James Bond” films, they’re kind of like those folks that work in Q that come up with these incredible solutions to difficult problems that have tremendous and successful effects in the end,” a senior military official told reporters.
Uranium enrichment is believed to have begun at Fordow in late 2011. The Iranians have insisted their program is peaceful, but Western officials long ago concluded the enrichment was really intended to enable Iran to make its own nuclear weapons.
In March, U.S. intelligence officials warned in a report to Congress that “there has been an erosion of a decadeslong taboo on discussing nuclear weapons in public” in Iran, and that this had “emboldened nuclear weapons advocates within Iran’s decision-making apparatus.” But as of then, intelligence officials said, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had yet to give the go-ahead to produce a nuclear weapon.
Fordow was key to Iran’s ability to do so, and the question of whether or when Iran would take that next step had preoccupied world leaders for more than a decade. “You do not build a multilayered underground bunker complex with centrifuges and other equipment in a mountain for any peaceful purpose,” Caine said.
But how do you destroy a complex buried deep beneath a mountain, intelligence and military analysts wondered. “They began a journey to work with industry and other tacticians to develop the GBU-57,” Caine said.
The GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or “MOP,” is armed with a warhead encased in steel and fused to blow up an estimated 200 feet underground. Under development since 2004 by the Air Force and DTRA, the weapon has been updated and refined multiple times since then. MORE
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/world-operation-midnight-hammer/
