Midnight Hammer hits Iran's nuclear sites

Have you ever rewired an outlet? Every electrician learns the rule early: before you touch a wire, you turn off the breaker. Not the switch on the wall, the breaker in the panel, the place the power comes from.

Iran's breaker panel is buried. Fordow is an enrichment plant dug deep under a ridge, built so that no ordinary airstrike could reach it. Israel began striking Iran on June 13, 2025. Eight days later, President Trump sent American bombers to the panel.

The night of the strike

On Saturday, June 21, 2025, seven B-2 bombers took off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri while decoy B-2s flew west over the Pacific. The real bombers flew about 18 hours, refueling in the air, and over roughly 25 minutes dropped 14 Massive Ordnance Penetrators, the 30,000-pound bunker busters, on Fordow and Natanz. A U.S. submarine fired more than two dozen Tomahawk missiles at Isfahan. More than 125 aircraft took part. Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, called it the largest B-2 operational strike in U.S. history.

Iran answered on June 23 by firing missiles at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar. President Trump said 13 of the 14 were shot down and that Iran had given advance notice. No Americans were hurt. That same day, after a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Trump announced a complete ceasefire between Israel and Iran, ending what he called the 12-Day War.

The fight over the damage

Here is the honest objection. Within hours of the strikes, a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency report, written with low confidence, guessed the program might have been set back only a few months. It leaked, and it made headlines. The administration's own language, that the sites were obliterated, went further than some outside experts would go.

That report was an early guess, and the later assessments pointed the other way. CIA Director John Ratcliffe said the program was "severely damaged" and that several major facilities would take years to rebuild. The UN nuclear watchdog's chief, Rafael Grossi, said Fordow's centrifuges were no longer working, though he called "annihilated" too strong a word. In July the Pentagon put the setback at closer to two years.

Iran's ability to enrich uranium was badly broken; of that I'm confident. I'm far less certain where all of its enriched uranium went; inspectors still have not been allowed back to the bombed sites, and the UN watchdog's chief said in March 2026 that a little over 200 kilograms of near-weapons-grade material likely remains, mostly in tunnels at Isfahan. That unfinished business is part of why the United States went back to war with Iran in 2026, a separate story with its own costs.

No electrician thinks a tripped breaker makes a house safe forever. But nobody gets shocked while it's off. Midnight Hammer turned off Iran's power at the panel in about 25 minutes, and the war it interrupted ended two days later.