They called them missile cities, not missile sites, not missile depots, cities. Entire underground civilizations carved into the hardest granite on Earth, running automated rail systems through tunnels wide enough to drive missile launchers through, stocked with row upon row of ballistic missiles and drones, sealed behind mountain walls that no bomb the world had previously tested in actual combat could reliably penetrate.
Iran spent 20 years and an enormous portion of its defense budget building these facilities specifically because it understood one thing with absolute clarity. The only way to survive a war with the United States was to put your most critical weapons somewhere America could not destroy them. And for two decades that bet looked like it was going to hold.
Then the United States Air Force flew seven B2 stealth bombers across the planet in the longest such mission in over two decades and unleashed something that had never been used in combat in the entire history of modern warfare. This is that full story sourced from verified military briefings, satellite imagery analysis, and official government records from the moment the mountain doors closed to the moment the bulldozers started digging them back open.
To understand what the United States unleashed, you first have to understand what Iran built. According to verified reporting from Reet News, citing military technical assessments, Iran’s underground missile facilities are not simply storage bunkers. They are constructed inside mountains composed of Sheru granite, one of the hardest naturally occurring rock formations on Earth.
According to the same verified assessment, this material can withstand crushing pressures far beyond what conventional construction materials can survive. And it presents what analysts described as one of the toughest barriers possible even for the most powerful bunker busting bomb the United States possessed. The interior of these facilities, according to the same verified WE news reporting, resembles a military city more than a storage facility.
Automated rail systems run through interconnected tunnels linking assembly areas, storage depots, and concealed launch exits. According to verified video analysis of Iranian military propaganda footage shown at the start of the 2026 war, missile launchers are transported by trucks through these tunnels brought to the surface for launch and then immediately returned underground before they can be targeted.
The system is designed to make every missile launch survivable for the launcher that fired it. The specific facility that defined the entire strategic problem was Fordo. According to verified reporting from multiple sources, including Fox News, CBS News, CSIS, Defense Security Monitor, and the Congressional Research Service, Fordo is Iran’s most fortified nuclear enrichment facility.
It was constructed clandestinely inside a mountain near the Shia holy city of Qom. Its existence concealed from international inspectors until 2009 when US and British intelligence revealed its location. According to verified Fox News reporting, the mountain above the Fordo facility is estimated to be more than 200 feet tall at the relevant depth and the facility itself is believed to sit as deep as 80 to 90 m underground.
According to the Congressional Research Services verified reporting, the IAEA assessed in March 2023 that Iran had stockpiled enough uranium enriched to 83.7% purity at Fordo to theoretically construct nine nuclear weapons, just below the 90% level required for weapons grade material.
Fordo was not a symbolic target. It was the crown of Iran’s entire deterrence architecture. The challenge Fordo presented to American planners had been the subject of classified and unclassified analysis for more than 15 years. According to verified reporting from Deken Herald, citing senior US officials in the Wall Street Journal, Pentagon war planners had concluded years before 2025 that even their largest conventional bomb was not yet fully capable of destroying some of Iran’s most hardened facilities.
The weapon in question was the GBU-57 Massive Ordinance Penetrator, also known as the MOP. According to a verified Fox News technical reporting, the MOP is 6 meters in length and weighs 13,600 kg. Its dense casing is engineered to remain structurally intact while punching through rock and reinforced concrete before detonating deep underground.
According to the verified technical specification reported by Fox News, the MOP can reach approximately 61 m below the surface before detonating, which is roughly 10 times further underground than the GBU-28 bunker busters held by Israel. The problem was that Fordo was believed to sit 80 to 90 m underground, putting it right at the edge of what even the MOP could reliably reach.
The US responded to that gap not by giving up on the weapon, but by spending years improving it. According to verified Deken Herald reporting, citing the Wall Street Journal’s own reporting on US officials, the Pentagon specifically accelerated work on improving the MOP’s penetrating capability because war planners had identified the gap between the weapons confirmed capabilities and the depth of Fordo’s hardened chambers.
The result of that year’s-long technical investment was a weapon that had never been dropped in actual combat at the time of June 2025. It had been tested. It had been developed, but it had never been used against a real target in a real war. According to verified Defense Scoop reporting citing Joint Chief’s Chairman, General Dan Kaine, the GBU-57 MOP weighed 30,000 lbs and carried 11 tons of TNT equivalent explosive power.
Only one aircraft in the American inventory can carry it. The B2 Spirit stealth bomber based at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. Operation Midnight Hammer changed all of that. On the night of June 21st to 22, 2025, according to verified reporting from Defense Scoop, Breaking Defense, CBS News, Axios, CSIS, Defense Security Monitor, and the Congressional Research Service, the United States conducted one of the most precisely planned and historically significant air operations in modern military history. Seven B2 Spirit stealth bombers departed from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri and flew to Iran. The mission involved more than 125 aircraft in total, including F-22 Raptor and F-35 Lightning 2 fifth generation fighters that preceded the strike package into Iranian airspace at high altitude and high speed, functioning as protective escorts and electronic warfare assets.
A guided missile submarine operating in the Middle East region launched more than two dozen BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the nuclear facility at Isvahan. The combined strike package targeted three Iranian nuclear facilities, Fordo, Natans, and Isvahan. According to verified Defense Scoop reporting directly citing General Kaine’s Pentagon briefing, the lead B2 bomber dropped two GBU-57 Massive Ordinance Penetrators on the first of several aim points at Fordo at approximately 6:40 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, 2:10 a.m. Iran time. The remaining B2 bombers then struck their assigned aim points. According to the verified Defense Scoop follow-up report citing a more detailed Pentagon briefing from June 26, 2025, a total of 12 of the 14 MOPs deployed in the operation were dropped specifically on two ventilation shafts at Fordo with each bomb programmed with a uniquely calibrated fuse designed to maximize penetration depth and detonation effectiveness at the precise underground depth of the target.
According to verified Axios reporting citing the Maxar satellite imagery shared publicly after the strike, large holes and craters were visible at Operation Pentagon briefing. The mission marked the longest B2 Spirit Bomber mission since 2001 and the first operational employment of the MOP in any military conflict in history.
According to verified Breaking Defense reporting citing General Kaine’s post briefing statement, Iran was caught completely unprepared for the operation. Kaine stated publicly that it did not appear US jets were fired upon during the mission and that Iran’s air defense surface-to-air missile systems had not detected the strike package entering or exiting Iranian airspace.
Iran’s fighters did not fly. The most fortified target in Iran’s nuclear arsenal buried under a mountain and surrounded by some of the most sophisticated air defenses in the Middle East was struck by seven stealth bombers that Iran never saw coming and never had the opportunity to engage.
The 2026 war, which began on February 28th when the US and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, took the mission against Iran’s underground infrastructure to a completely new scale. If Midnight Hammer was a surgical strike on nuclear facilities, Operation Epic Fury was a systematic campaign to suppress, seal, and destroy Iran’s entire underground missile arsenal.
According to verified reporting from the Air Force Times, citing Joint Chiefs Chairman General Kaine’s Pentagon briefing during Operation Epic Fury, the US military employed a second class of penetrator weapon against Iran’s underground missile storage infrastructure, the GBU-72 advanced 5,000lb penetrator. General Kaine confirmed publicly that the US dropped these 5,000 lb penetrator weapons into underground storage facilities containing Iran’s coastal defense cruise missiles and related support equipment.
According to Kaine’s verified statement, these weapons are specifically designed to get through concrete and rock and to function after penetrating those barriers. According to verified Air Force Times reporting, the GBU-72 represented its own combat debut during the Operation Epic Fury campaign with its first operational use against hardened coastal missile sites near the Strait of Hormuz confirmed by US officials and first reported by the War Zone.
According to verified Gulf News reporting, B-1B Lancer bombers were also loaded with heavy bunker buster munitions at RAF Fairford in Britain during the campaign and prepared for potential strikes on Iran’s underground facilities. According to the verified Gulf News technical summary, the B-1B Lancer is a long range strategic bomber capable of carrying 34 tons of weapons, able to fly at supersonic speeds and strike targets thousands of kilometers away, and designed specifically for deep strike missions against hardened targets.
The loading of B-1 bombers with heavy penetrator weapons at Fairford, captured on video by observers on the ground in Britain, was interpreted by defense analysts at the time as a public signal that the US was preparing to hit Iran’s underground missile infrastructure at a scale and with a variety of platforms beyond what had been previously employed.
The campaign’s stated goal for the underground facilities was not to destroy what was inside them, but to seal the doors. According to verified CNN reporting and the CNN satellite imagery analysis published May 31st, 2026, the US and Israeli strategy against Iran’s underground missile facilities deliberately focused on destroying tunnel entrances, access roads, and surface infrastructure rather than attempting to penetrate the deeply buried underground chambers themselves.
The logic was explained by Sam Lair, a research associate at the James Martin Center for Non-Proliferation Studies and CNN’s verified reporting. Iran can continue launching missiles as long as it has launchers and sealing the tunnel entrances would prevent those launchers from reaching the surface. The facilities have been built over 20 years, specifically to protect their contents from aerial bombardment, and the US strategy acknowledged that the contents themselves were largely beyond reach of conventional munitions.
Instead, the campaign aimed to entomb them for a period. The strategy produced measurable results. According to verified CNN reporting, during the fighting, US and Israeli strikes repeatedly struck not just tunnel entrances, but also the construction equipment Iran deployed to excavate those entrances.
According to the same verified reporting, Iran was working to dig out its tunnels. Even as the strikes were ongoing, at considerable peril because leaving its launchers underground during a ceasefire was not a sustainable position. The strikes hit the diggers alongside the tunnels. Iran kept digging anyway. According to verified MSN reporting from April 6th, 2026, citing a newly published US intelligence report referenced in the New York Times, American officials had warned internally that Iran was deliberately preserving its missile strength to maintain pressure throughout a prolonged conflict and to retain leverage once hostilities ended.
According to the same verified reporting, Washington could not be certain how many missile launchers had actually been destroyed because Iran had deployed decoys across its surface infrastructure to complicate damage assessments.
The ceasefire that took hold in early April 2026 did not stop Iran’s underground reconstruction. It accelerated it. According to verified CNN satellite imagery analysis published May 31st, 2026, citing imagery provided by Airbus Defense and Space, Iran had reopened 50 of the 69 tunnel entrances struck at 18 underground missile facilities in the 7 weeks since the ceasefire was declared.
According to the same verified CNN report, Iran had also repaired access roads that the US and Israel had specifically bombed to prevent missile launchers from using them. Satellite images showed that almost all of those road craters had been filled, and at two sites, the roads had been repaved entirely. According to verified reporting from Israel Hayom, citing four sources involved in US intelligence assessments, the Iranian military was recovering faster than initial assessments had predicted.
According to one US official cited in the verified Israel Hayom reporting, the Iranians had beaten every timetable the intelligence community had set for the pace of their recovery. According to verified reporting from Times of Israel, 1945, and the Defense News, US intelligence assessments as of late May 2026 estimated that Iran still holds approximately 1,000 missiles in its deep underground storage facilities—facilities whose inner chambers had not been significantly damaged by the strikes because the strikes focused on entrances rather than interiors.
According to verified 1945 reporting, while satellite imagery showed extensive damage at the entrances of these sites and bomb craters across surface infrastructure, the true extent of internal damage remained unknown, and the inter-missile stockpiles built over two decades of construction were largely inaccessible to even the most powerful conventional bombs the US had deployed.
According to verified CNN reporting citing the analysis of defense experts, even with the partial reopening of the tunnel network, restoring full Iranian strike capability requires not just open tunnels, but also operational launchers, trained crews, and fueled missiles. The bombing campaign had degraded all three.
But the pace of reconstruction was raising questions that the initial post-war narrative had not fully addressed. According to Jay Feed’s verified reporting on the satellite imagery findings, the satellite images document fleets of heavy construction equipment clearing rubble, filling cratered access roads, and in at least two cases fully repaving them.
According to the same verified reporting, experts estimated Iran could fully restore its drone strike capability within approximately 6 months of the ceasefire, supported by its existing technical expertise, manufacturing infrastructure, and continued access to dual-use commercial components. According to verified reporting from Ground News aggregating confirmed sources, Russia and China were reported to be assisting Iran’s reconstruction efforts.
According to the verified CNN reporting, US intelligence assessments also acknowledged that Iran had restarted parts of its drone production network during the ceasefire period. The deepest question that all of these verified facts leave open is the one that no satellite image can fully answer. When the US dropped 14 MOPs on Fordo’s ventilation shafts in June 2025, when it deployed the GBU-72 in combat for the first time against Iran’s coastal missile storage in 2026, when it struck tunnel entrances at 18 separate missile facilities across Iran’s mountain ranges during Operation Epic Fury, it executed every conventional military option available to it against this specific class of target.
The result, according to verified intelligence assessments and satellite imagery, was not the permanent elimination of Iran’s underground missile capability, but the temporary suppression of it; the missiles that were already inside the mountains when the bombs fell on the entrances were still inside those mountains, when the bulldozers started clearing the rubble 7 weeks later. The weapon that broke through mountains was real, historic, and unprecedented in its operational debut. What it could not do was reach everything that Iran had hidden deeper than it could reach. And that gap between what the most powerful conventional bombs in American history could destroy and what Iran’s engineers had buried beyond their reach is where the next chapter of this story is already being written.
Script prepared based on verified sourced reporting from Air Force Times citing Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Kaine Pentagon briefing. Defense Scoop verified reporting on Operation Midnight Hammer. Breaking Defense verified operation account. CBS News verified Pentagon briefing account. Axios verified satellite imagery and official statements. CSIS verified analysis.
Defense Security Monitor verified reporting. Congressional Research Service verified document on Operation Midnight Hammer. Fox News verified technical reporting on bunker buster weapons. Gulf News verified reporting on B-1 deployment at RAF Fairford. CNN verified satellite imagery analysis May 31st, 2026.
Citing Airbus Defense and Space imagery, Times of Israel verified reporting, 1945 verified analysis. The Defense News verified reporting citing CNN satellite data. Israel Hayom verified reporting citing four intelligence sources. Jay Feed verified satellite imagery report. WE News verified technical assessment. MSN verified reporting citing NY Times intelligence account and Ground News verified aggregated source reporting.
All claims are sourced from publicly verified reports.
