The mission to destroy the Iranian nuclear facility at Fordow could only be accomplished with a special type of bomb, the 15-ton Massive Ordnance Penetrator, which can only be carried by one plane — the B-2 Spirit bomber. The bombers made an incredible 37-hour roundtrip flight from Missouri to successfully attack their targets.
The B-2 Spirit bombers flown from Whiteman Air Force Base near Kansas City, Missouri, to Iran over the weekend feature mini refrigerators, a microwave, and cooler for snacks — and just like any aircraft expected to be in the air for a long duration flight, a toilet as well.
The heavy strategic bomber is also spacious enough to allow one pilot the chance to lay down and rest while the other operates the $2 billion aircraft, according to a report by the New York Post.
On Friday, the B-2 Spirits took off from their base in America to carry out bombing raids of Iranian nuclear facilities for Operation Midnight Hammer, flying 18 hours across the world before conducting their airstrikes on Saturday.
The distinctive flying wing bombers had to be refueled in midair multiple times amid their 37-hour round-trip raid, which reportedly made for the longest B-2 mission since 2001, when the U.S. initially responded to the September 11 terrorist attacks, striking Afghanistan.
“For hours, the seven B-2 bombers had flown in near complete radio silence,” the Telegraph reported, adding that a fleet of fighter jets and support aircraft joined them in the night skies as they approached Iranian airspace.
While the bombers made for Fordow to strike the well-protected Iranian nuclear facility, secured underneath a mountain, a sole B-2 alongside one support aircraft veered off toward in Natanz, to bomb the easier target, an enrichment facility.
Meanwhile, six B-2 bombers reportedly released a dozen 30,000-pound bombs on Fordow.
To take out the underground nuclear site at Fordow, the stealth bomber had to drop 15-ton bunker busters — the largest non-nuclear bomb in the United States’ arsenal — in order to destroy the target some 300 feet inside a mountain, the Post noted. The bombs are officially designated as the GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator, commonly referred to as MOPs.
Moreover, the weight of the bomb makes it so that only a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber can drop it.
The MOP, which costs over $500 million, was reportedly developed so it could penetrate deep enough underground to destroy targets like the Fordow plant that are protected from normal munitions.
On Saturday evening, President Donald Trump announced that the United States had just completed a “very successful attack on” three nuclear sites in Iran: Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan.
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“There is not another military in the world that could have done this,” President Trump declared in a Truth Social post.
Satellite imagery taken after the raid revealed that the bombs, “each one weighing as much as three adult African elephants,” making for the world’s heaviest conventional bombs had successfully struck their targets, the Telegraph noted.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Daniel Caine, praised the bombers and additional aircraft for carrying out “a complex, tightly timed maneuver” that required “exact synchronization across multiple platforms in a narrow piece of airspace.”
The general added that the 25-minute operation inside Iran was successfully completed needing “minimal communications.”
The bombing raid of the Islamic state’s nuclear sites reportedly transpired on Saturday at 6:40 p.m. EST (1:40 a.m. local time in Iran), beginning with the lead B-2 dropping two GBU-57 “bunker buster” munitions on the “first of several aim points at Fordow,” Caine disclosed.
“The remaining bombers then hit their targets, as well, with a total of 14 MOPs [Massive Ordnance Penetrators] dropped against two nuclear target areas,” the general further revealed.
First entering the service in 1997, the two-pilot crew B-2 bomber, originally designed to drop nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union, features a wingspan of 172 feet and costs $2 billion each.
Alana Mastrangelo is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.
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