Late on June 22nd, the United States used bombers and long-range missiles to strike three nuclear facilities in Iran suspected of building weapons. The attack, codenamed Operation Midnight Hammer, was the largest B-2 bomber operational strike in the aircraft’s history. So how many of its B-2 bombers did the U.S. use? Almost all of them.

The Northrup B-2 Spirit stealth bomber

The Advanced Technology Bomber (ATB) project had a lofty goal. In the late 1970s, it set out to build a bomber that could fly around the planet and drop an atomic weapon, completely undetected. The Northrup Grumman corporation took the challenge head-on, designing a futuristic flying wing invisible to long-distance radar.

Northrup Grumman bought an old Ford factory in California to build the B-2 bombers. The employees were heavily vetted, sworn to secrecy, and subjected to routine polygraph tests. Yet at least two employees were later convicted of selling secrets about the bomber’s tech to the Russians and Chinese, respectively.

The Air Force originally planned to buy 132 of the bomber airplanes. But by the bomber’s first publicized flight in 1989, the fall of the Soviet Union left little demand for the Cold War era project. In addition, each bomber set the country back $737 million. That would be well over a billion dollars today. So Congress voted to scale the project back and bought just 21 bombers.

A crash destroyed one B-2 bomber. Another was damaged and retired. In 2010, the USAF spent $2 billion modernizing the radar and other electronics onboard the remaining bombers. They were likely upgraded with capabilities that remain classified. They are all still in use today.

Pres Trump scrambled almost every B-2 bomber in operation

Early on June 21st, “several” B-2 bombers took off from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. They flew west around the planet. A series of air refueling tankers met them on their trip to Iran. But they took a flight path that was purposefully trackable because they were simply a decoy.

After one fleet of B-2s few west, an additional seven bombers took off and flew east around the globe. The “strike package” flying over the Atlantic wasn’t a decoy, it was the real attack of Operation Midnight Hammer. These seven bombers flew through Iraq airspace and into Iran late on June 21st.

The B-2 bombers met up with U.S. fighter jets. Then the jets flew high and fast over Iran to sweep for fighter aircraft or surface-to-air missiles targeting the bombers. A nearby submarine launched a series of Tomahawk cruise missiles targeting sites in Iran at the same time.

The lead B-2 hit Iran’s Fordow Uranium enrichment plant first. This site has well over 1,000 centrifuges producing “near bomb-grade” uranium (CNN) deep underground. Israel has previously targeted the bunker-like facility, but obviously been unable to destroy it.

The aftermath of Operation Midnight Hammer

The lead B-2 bomber dropped two 30,000-pound GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrators, which are designed to drill their way underground and destroy facilities just like Fordow. The other six B-2 bombers dropped their own MOPs. In total, the attack used half the MOPs that have ever been manufactured.

President Trump called it a “very successful attack” that “obliterated” Fordow. Iranian sources disagreed, calling the damage to all three sites “quite superficial.” See what it’s like to fly in the B-2 in the video below: