One day after claiming he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, President Donald Trump joined the war in the Middle East by dropping the biggest non-nuclear bombs in the U.S. arsenal.
After days of tense speculation over whether the U.S. would get involved in the conflict, Trump confirmed on Saturday night that bombs dropped by American warplanes had hit three key nuclear sites in Iran.
“We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “All planes are now outside of Iran airspace. A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow.”
Though the Truth Social post did not specify what bombs were dropped, Trump told Fox News host Sean Hannity that the U.S. dropped six “bunker buster” bombs to target the nuclear enrichment plants.
The bunker buster, officially the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), is a 30,000-pound weapon produced by Boeing that measures approximately 21 feet in length and 31.5 inches in diameter. It uses a GPS-guided precision targeting system.
The MOP is “designed to accomplish a difficult, complicated mission of reaching and destroying our adversaries’ weapons of mass destruction located in well-protected facilities,” according to the Air Force.
The only aircraft designed to deploy the MOP is the B-2 Spirit, a stealth bomber built by Northrop Grumman that has an unrefueled range of about 6,000 nautical miles or around 9,600 kilometers.
The Air Force credits the B-2’s low observability to a combination of reduced infrared, acoustic, electromagnetic, visual, and radar signatures, which make it difficult for sophisticated defensive systems to detect.
“All planes are safely on their way home,” Trump said Saturday night. “Congratulations to our great American Warriors. There is not another military in the World that could have done this.”
Trump said Iran’s nuclear facilities were “completely and totally obliterated,” though Iranian officials have downplayed the damage.
Both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump have insisted that Iran has long been close to producing nuclear weapons. When Israel first struck Iran last week, Netanyahu claimed that Iran’s nuclear program posed a “clear and present danger to Israel’s very survival.”
But Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence has refuted those claims. Tulsi Gabbard told a Congressional hearing earlier this year that the U.S. intelligence community did not believe that Iran was building a nuclear weapon.
That intel seemed to carry little significance to the president, who told reporters on Friday: “Well, then my intelligence community is wrong.”
Trump’s deployment of the bunker busters broke a record he set during his first administration.
In 2017, the U.S. dropped the “mother of all bombs” on an ISIS cave complex in Afghanistan. The MOAB, formally known as the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, weighed 21,600 pounds and was deployed by an MC-130 aircraft.
The strike killed dozens of ISIS militants and destroyed their base, according to Afghan officials. ISIS maintained that none of its fighters were killed.
The attack on the Iranian nuclear sites came just over a day after Trump made the case for why he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
On Friday, Trump announced on Truth Social that he and State Secretary Marco Rubio had brokered a peace treaty to end the decades-long conflict between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
“This is a Great Day for Africa and, quite frankly, a Great Day for the World! I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize for this,” Trump wrote, followed by a laundry list of reasons why he believed he deserved the honor, including “stopping the War between Serbia and Kosovo” and “keeping Peace between Egypt and Ethiopia.”
“No, I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what I do, including Russia/Ukraine, and Israel/Iran, whatever those outcomes may be, but the people know, and that’s all that matters to me!” he said.
MAGAworld characters appeared to agree. Last week, as the right imploded into a civil war over whether the Trump administration should join the Israel-Iran conflict, conservative pundit Scott Jennings said in an X post that an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities could “win the Nobel” for Trump.
Trump doubled down on his Nobel Peace Prize campaign as he spoke to reporters in New Jersey on Friday.
“I should have gotten it four or five times,” he argued. “They won’t give me a Nobel Peace Prize, because they only give it to liberals.”
The self-proclaimed peacemaker, who ran on a campaign of ending wars and dodged the military draft five times during the Vietnam War, ended his announcement of U.S. strikes on Iran with an all-caps call for calm.
“NOW IS THE TIME FOR PEACE!” Trump said.
