US Deploys Bunker‑Buster Bombs Against Iran’s Hidden Facilities

Picture this.

Deep beneath the mountains of Iran, carved into rock over decades and at a cost of billions of dollars, sits a network of underground cities.

Not cities for civilians, cities for missiles, tunnels wide enough to drive military vehicles through.

Underground halls lined with hundreds of ballistic missiles, each one capable of reaching targets across the Middle East.

Iran’s regime poured its pride, its resources, and its entire war strategy into these fortresses, genuinely believing they were untouchable.

They were wrong.

The bunkers are caving in on themselves.

And to make it happen, the United States deployed weapons so precisely lethal that they turned Iran’s greatest military asset into its greatest liability.

Welcome to World Brief Daily.

Today we are going inside the complete and systematic destruction of Iran’s missile cities, the unstoppable bombs that made it possible, and the fatal strategic flaw that Iran never saw coming.

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Let’s start with the numbers because they tell a story more devastating than any headline.

Over 3,000 strikes conducted across Iran.

43 warships destroyed, an 83% decrease in Iran’s drone attacks after launch sites were crippled all across the country.

And Iran’s daily missile launches have collapsed by more than 90% from their peak in the opening days of the conflict.

These are not estimates.

These are the figures coming directly from military officials, satellite imagery analysts, and intelligence assessments published in real time.

But before we get to the mechanics of how all of this happened, we need to understand the weapon at the center of this story, because this weapon explains everything.

The United States Air Force’s GBU57 massive ordinance penetrator.

You can call it the MOP.

And if you’ve never heard of it, that tells you exactly how classified this weapon has been.

The MOP is 20 ft long.

It weighs 30,000 lb.

It carries 11 tons of TNT equivalent explosive power.

and it is capable of tunneling through more than 100 feet of reinforced concrete before detonating.

As reported by Breaking Defense, this weapon had never been used in an operational conflict before.

It had only ever been tested until now.

According to CBS News, seven B2 Spirit stealth bombers flew east from Whiteitman Air Force Base in Missouri on a mission that would become the longest B2 flight since 2001.

Those bombers refueled multiple times in midair over an 18-hour journey toward Iran.

Meanwhile, a separate group of B2s flew west toward the Pacific as decoys deliberately seating confusion into any intelligence network watching American aircraft movements.

More than 125 aircraft participated in the total operation, including fighter escorts, surveillance drones, and aerial refueling tankers.

The Pentagon dubbed the nuclear strike phase of this campaign operation midnight hammer.

And when Defense Secretary Pete Hegsth stood at the podium to describe it, he did not hold back.

In a June 22nd press briefing, Hegith declared that Iran’s nuclear ambitions had been obliterated.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dan Kaine, speaking alongside Hegsith, called it the largest B2 operational strike in United States history, producing extremely severe damage and destruction to the targets.

Here is where it gets deeply technical and deeply important.

Those seven B2 bombers dropped 14 GBU57 mops on two targets, the Fordo uranium enrichment plant and the Natan’s nuclear facility.

Fordo is buried under 300 ft of rock inside a mountain.

That depth was deliberate.

Iran chose it specifically because conventional weapons cannot reach it.

But as Chairman Kaine explained at the Pentagon briefing, American engineers at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency had been studying Fordo for approximately 15 years.

They monitored, in Kane’s own words, 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.

Two DTR officers, Kain said, had literally dreamed about this target as they slept.

This was not improvised.

This was 15 years of patient, obsessive preparation culminating in a strike that Iran never saw coming.

The MOP delivery method itself was a marvel of precision.

According to General Kane’s briefing, the lead B2 dropped two mops on the first aim point at Fordo.

The first bomb forcibly removed a defensive concrete cap, uncovering the main shaft underneath.

Weapons 2, three, four, and five then entered that exposed shaft, traveling at more than 1,000 ft per second into the complex below before detonating in what Cain described as the mission space.

12 mops went into Fordo, two went into Natans, and from a submarine operating in the central command area of responsibility, more than two dozen Tomahawk land attack cruise missiles were fired at surface infrastructure targets at the Isvahan nuclear complex.

According to satellite imagery provided by Maxar Technologies, several large diameter holes and craters appeared along the ridge above the Fordo complex.

A layer of gray blue ash spread across a wide area.

Multiple tunnel entrances were blocked with dirt following the air strikes.

As the war zone reported, the actual ridgeel line where the MOPs entered appears to have been physically altered.

Open source analysts created topographical models layering imagery from June 22nd.

And what they found suggests that the strike hit the cascade hall buried underneath the impact points.

This was not a near miss.

This was surgical destruction at a depth the world had never seen in combat.

Now, the nuclear strikes under Operation Midnight Hammer were just one chapter of a much larger campaign because before the B2s ever took off, Iran’s air defense network had already been destroyed.

And that collapse is what made everything else possible.

As reported by the Times of Israel, Israeli strikes beginning on June 13th spent approximately 10 days systematically dismantling Iran’s air defenses.

After the June 2025 12-day war, IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Herzy Halevi had already claimed that Israeli forces destroyed 120 Iranian transporter erector launchers and established full aerial superiority over Iran within days.

But the 2025 war left work unfinished.

Iran rebuilt.

And when the current conflict began, Israel returned with one mission, finish the job.

The Alma Research Center’s assessment of the ongoing operation found that approximately 85% of Iranian air defense components had been destroyed across all of Iran, including systems of all types, radars, and detection means.

For comparison, in June 2025, Israel had only achieved air superiority in three specific regions.

Now, it covers the entire country.

Thran itself became vulnerable.

Iran’s fighters did not fly.

As General Kaine confirmed at the Pentagon briefing, it appears that Iran’s surfaceto-air missile systems did not see the incoming strike package at all.

The country that spent decades and tens of billions of dollars building an integrated air defense network was rendered blind at the moment that mattered most.

But now we need to step back further because the air defense collapse and the nuclear strikes are only part of this story.

The bigger story is what happened to Iran’s missile cities.

And to understand that, you first need to understand what a missile city actually is.

Iran’s concept of the missile city is unlike anything in the Western military playbook.

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies reported in 2025 that Iran had actually released video tours of at least four of these facilities, displaying them as a show of strength.

These videos showed medium-range ballistic missiles such as the Hajj Kasam and the Gutter H, both with ranges hovering around the 1,000mi mark.

They showed land attack cruise missiles.

They showed the vast underground tunnel networks used to transport and store Iran’s massive stockpiles.

These were not simple underground bunkers.

These were entire subterranean military ecosystems complete with roads, command facilities, logistics infrastructure, and launch systems, all integrated into mountains and deep terrain.

The Wall Street Journal in a March 5th examination of where Iran’s strategy went wrong, noted that decades of work had gone into the construction of these bunkers.

Iran’s leadership genuinely believed these facilities were the insurance policy that guaranteed the regime’s survival.

If Iran was ever threatened with obliteration, the missile cities would allow it to launch thousands of ballistic missiles and saturation strikes that would overwhelm any adversaries defenses.

It was Iran’s great equalizer.

And here is the fatal flaw.

Here is the error so simple, so structurally obvious in retrospect that it is almost painful to articulate.

The missile cities stripped all mobility from Iran’s missile strategy.

Sam Lear, a research associate at the James Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies, put it directly to the Wall Street Journal.

What was once mobile and difficult to find is no longer mobile and easier to hit.

That is the whole story.

Iran, in an attempt to centralize and protect its missiles at massive scale, created fixed targets.

And fixed targets, once discovered, are simply targets.

You do not need to chase them.

You do not need to anticipate their movements.

You simply wait for the right moment and then you strike.

Israeli and American intelligence had already identified where these so-called secret bunkers were located long before the first bomb fell.

Satellite imagery can capture the transportation of missiles and personnel to and from these sites.

Roads do not build themselves in the middle of nowhere without attracting attention.

thermal signatures, construction timelines, vehicle traffic patterns, all of it visible to the surveillance apparatus that the United States and Israel had quietly positioned above Iran for years.

So when the strikes began, the United States executed a wave-based strike strategy.

Former US Army missile specialist Colin David explained the approach.

These attacks are being carried out in waves where they destroy two or three targets at a time.

After multiple waves, the bases lose their effectiveness due to the loss of surface structures and launchers.

Wave after wave, each one collapsing more tunnels, destroying more missile launch sites, burying more of Iran’s arsenal underground where it could never be used.

The BLU 109 penetrator bomb, which weighs approximately 2,000 pounds and is built with a steel alloy casing specifically engineered for hardened targets, has been the workhouse of this campaign.

Once inside its target, the BLU 109 unleashes a high explosive blast fragmentation warhead that creates massive craters, allows for follow-up strikes, and can be delivered via GPSG guided bomb kits at distances of up to 15 miles, keeping American aircraft beyond the reach of whatever remained of Iran’s air defenses.

We have seen what this weapon can do before.

As the war zone reported in February 2025, a BLU 109 strapped to a GBU31 guided bomb was the weapon Israel used to kill Hezbollah leader Hassan Nazalla along with several of his senior commanders, targeting an underground bunker where they were coordinating their military operations.

The bomb penetrated so cleanly and exploded so deep that nearby civilians survived the surface blast.

That is the precision and penetrative power the United States has now brought to Iran’s missile cities at a scale Hezbollah never could have imagined.

An underground bunker has one critical weakness.

You can only use it if you can get in and out of it.

And the US found the exits.

Satellite imagery circulating in mainstream media tells the story better than any briefing.

The New York Times published before and after photographs of several Iranian sites on March 3rd near Isvahan.

An entire surface facility had been raised to the ground.

In Kangavar, the entrance to an underground complex had been caved in by March 2nd.

In Carman Shaw, above ground buildings had been leveled with a telltale crater sitting directly beside a tunnel entrance.

Another 2,000lb penetrator had found its mark, collapsed the passage, and sealed whatever was inside forever.

Iran’s missile cities were never designed to function as sealed tombs.

They were designed as active military platforms where missiles could be moved in, loaded onto launchers, transported to firing positions, used, and replenished.

That entire cycle depended on the freedom to move in and out.

When the United States began systematically destroying the entrances and exits of these complexes, Iran’s missiles became intombed.

The launches that had to be staged near the surface to enable ballistic missile fire became sitting ducks for American warplanes and surveillance aircraft circling continuously above.

The Wall Street Journal described US and Israeli warplanes and armed drones circling over dozens of cavernous bases striking missile carrying launchers the moment they emerged to fire.

Meanwhile, waves of heavy bombers dropped munitions directly on the sites, apparently intombing Iranian weapons below ground in numerous locations.

And now the data from the battlefield tells us exactly how complete this dismantlement has been.

According to Admiral Brad Cooper, head of US Central Command, Iran’s ability to hit us and our partners is declining.

That statement was released on March 3rd.

The following morning, General Kaine confirmed that Iran’s theater ballistic missile launches had fallen 86% since the first day of the conflict with the sharpest drop in the preceding 24 hours.

According to the Foundation for Defense of Democracies analysis, Iran opened the conflict on February 28th with approximately 480 missile launches in a single day.

A desperate all-in saturation strike designed to overwhelm Allied air defenses before the campaign could gain momentum.

By March 9th, that daily launch rate had collapsed to approximately 40 missiles.

That is a decline of 92% in just 10 days.

The drone numbers tell the same story.

From a peak of 720 drone launches per day at the start of the conflict, Iran fell to approximately 60 per day within the same time frame.

As Jinsa reported on March 7th, US Operation Epic Fury and Israeli Operation Roaring Lion together drove Iranian daily missile fire down approximately three times faster than the suppression campaign during last year’s 12-day war.

And the comparison to the 12-day war is instructive.

In June 2025, according to CSIS data, Iran fired approximately 627 ballistic missiles and 735 drones across the entire 12-day conflict.

In the current war, Iran had already exceeded those totals within the first four days.

But crucially, as the Jerusalem Post reported, the rate of collapse in the current campaign is steeper and faster.

Iran entered this fight harder but fell apart sooner.

The underlying capacity is not being conserved.

It is being physically destroyed.

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Now, the losses compound in other ways, too.

Within the first 24 hours of the joint USIsraeli strikes, approximately half of Iran’s missile launchers had been taken out of commission, according to the New York Times.

The IDF’s assessment by day 10 estimated that Iran retained between only 100 and 200 active launchers.

Before this war, Iran’s launcher fleet had been substantially rebuilt after the 12-day war, with Thrron pursuing an accelerated rehabilitation program targeting an arsenal of 8,000 missiles by 2027, according to Israeli intelligence assessments published by the Alma Research Center.

That ambition is gone.

The infrastructure to execute it is largely gone, too.

The Foreign Policy Research Institute’s analysis of the June 2025 war identified a key dynamic that has now been amplified massively in this campaign.

Without functional air defenses to cover Iranian transporter erector launchers and support vehicles as they emerged from underground missile bases, Israeli and American aircraft could strike the mobile launchers and tunnel entrances at will, bottling up whatever remained inside.

This is precisely the dynamic that has been playing out on a far larger scale in the current conflict.

And there is one more layer to all of this that makes Iran’s situation even more desperate.

The United States is not just destroying what Iran has.

It is pursuing the capacity to rebuild.

In the last hour, two US bombers dropped dozens of 2,000 lb penetrator bombs targeting deeply buried ballistic missile launchers, Admiral Cooper proclaimed on March 5th.

He added that the US is following the direct orders of President Donald Trump to raise Iran’s entire missile capability to the ground.

And then Cooper’s words became even more sweeping.

The president gave us another task, he said, to raise or level Iran’s ballistic missile industrial base.

So, we’re not just hitting what they have or destroying their ability to rebuild.

This is the systematic destruction of an entire military doctrine.

It is not just the missiles.

It is not just the bunkers.

It is the factories that manufacture them, the supply chains that feed them, the engineering capacity that would allow Iran to start over.

The Elma Research Center confirmed in its week three assessment that strikes have caused highly significant damage to launching, storage, and production capabilities simultaneously.

Iran’s ability to project ballistic missile power is not being degraded.

It is being erased.

There is something almost paradoxical in how Iran brought this upon itself.

The missile cities represented decades of investment, strategic brilliance, and genuine engineering achievement.

They were built to provide survivability in exactly the kind of conflict Iran now finds itself in.

And yet, as Sam Liar observed at the James Martin Center, what was once mobile and difficult to find is no longer mobile and easier to hit.

By concentrating its entire missile doctrine into fixed underground sites, Iran made itself permanently vulnerable to any adversary with the intelligence infrastructure to find those sites and the munitions to penetrate them.

The United States had both, and it had been quietly preparing to use them for years, studying every vent shaft, every exhaust system, every construction detail of Iran’s most important facilities with a level of obsession that Iran’s regime clearly underestimated.

satellite imagery, surveillance aircraft, intelligence networks, patient yearslong preparation, and then when the moment came, 14 30,000lb bombs dropped in a single night on the most hardened nuclear facilities Iran possessed.

That is what it looks like when preparation meets opportunity.

The crude silos Iran dug into mountain sides pointing toward the Persian Gulf, as described by the Wall Street Journal, offered almost no additional survivability.

They are essentially fixed points, easily located, easily targeted.

The mobile launcher approach that Iran used to supplement its missile cities offered more flexibility in theory.

But once surveillance aircraft control the skies continuously, a mobile launcher that moves is a mobile launcher that gets spotted and struck.

According to President Trump, the United States requires just four minutes from detecting a missile launch to dispatching a bomber to destroy the launch site.

Four minutes.

That does not leave Iran enough time to fire, move, and survive.

The broader consequences of all this are still unfolding.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has reportedly begun shifting toward asymmetric ground operations as conventional military power collapses with Russia providing real-time intelligence on US positions.

According to the Jerusalem Post, the succession of Mojaba Kame as Supreme Leader with IRGC and armed forces pledging allegiance suggests that the regime is attempting institutional continuity.

But as the Alma Research Center noted in its assessment, it is impossible to know whether the conditions for the regime’s fall have already been created.

What is known is that Iran’s air defense network is essentially gone.

Its missile production infrastructure has been struck hard.

Its stockpile of ballistic missiles is being consumed at a rate that is unsustainable.

Its launcher fleet has been reduced to a fraction of its wartime strength.

and its underground missile cities, the crown jewels of decades of strategic thinking, have been turned into traps.

The nuclear program that was the center of all the tension, is in ruins.

A nuclear weapons expert named David Albbright, analyzing data from the International Atomic Energy Agency concluded after the US strikes that Iran has no path to produce weaponsgrade uranium at any of its known centrifuge plants for the first time in 15 years.

15 years of nuclear ambition undone in a single night by seven B2 bombers that Iran never saw coming.

For Vladimir Putin watching from Moscow, this is a nightmare scenario.

Iran was the lynchpin of the alternative power axis he had spent years constructing.

A resistant missilearmed nuclear adjacent Iran that could pin down American resources in the Middle East while Russia pursued its objectives in Europe.

That calculation is now being shredded alongside Iran’s missile silos and bunker entrances.

The Iranian regime is collapsing alongside its missile threat and taking with it all of Putin’s carefully built plans for the Middle East.

The lesson of all this is not simply that the United States has powerful weapons.

Everyone knew that.

The lesson is that preparation, patience, and intelligence are what make powerful weapons decisive.

15 years of studying Fordo, 15 years of mapping exhaust shafts and centrifuge halls, watching and waiting.

And when the moment arrived, striking with such precision and such scale that no amount of concrete or mountain rock made any difference.

Iran thought it was being clever when it built its missile cities.

It was not.

It was building a map of its own destruction and handing that map to the one adversary with the patience to read it carefully and the firepower to act on it completely.

We will of course keep you updated as new assessments emerge as satellite imagery continues to reveal the full scope of damage and as the broader consequences of Iran’s military collapse play out across the region and beyond.

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