Iran has announced that a response against the United States will be inevitable, and the first step is the “destruction of Israel”. This comment was made by Mehdi Mohammadi, an advisor to the speaker of the Iranian parliament.
He claims that the US attack was not surprising and that Iranian authorities evacuated the Fordow facility in advance.
Mehdi Mohammadi said that “the hand of the aggressor America must and will be cut off, and the way to cut off America's hand is to cut Netanyahu's throat“.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian condemned the US strikes on nuclear sites in Iran and defined them as aggression, world agencies reported, quoted by BTA.
He also accused Washington of being behind Israel's military operation in Iran. “This aggression has shown that America is the main factor behind the hostile actions of the Zionist regime against the Islamic Republic of Iran“, Pezeshkian said, adding that the United States intervened after noting Israel's obvious inability.
Following the US strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites, Iran has the legal right to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty based on Article 10 thereof, Abbas Golru, chairman of the parliamentary foreign policy committee of the Islamic Consultative Assembly (Iranian parliament), said today on the "Ex" platform, quoted by Reuters.
The agency notes that according to Article 10, each member state has "the right to withdraw from the treaty if it decides that extraordinary events have threatened the supreme interests of its country," BTA reported.
Donald Trump announced a few hours ago that he carried out strikes on nuclear sites in Iran, but did not go into details about the bombs and bombers used. According to the world agencies Agence France-Presse, Associated Press and Reuters, it is very likely that American heavy strategic bombers and powerful American anti-bunker bombs were used for the strikes.
The American anti-bunker bomb, which is the only one capable of penetrating deep below the surface of the earth and destroying Iranian nuclear facilities located deep underground, is the strategic weapon known as the GBU-57 A/B and weighs 13 tons and is 6.6 meters long. It is capable of penetrating tens of meters deep before exploding. Israel does not have such an ammunition and this prevented it from achieving its goal, namely to prevent Tehran from creating a nuclear weapon. The GBU-57 A/B bomb is designed to penetrate more than 60 meters underground before exploding. Unlike many missiles or bombs that detonate their charge upon impact, this anti-bunker bomb cuts and burrows into the ground to explode only when it reaches the underground facility, writes BTA.
These weapons have a "very thick shell of reinforced steel" that helps them "penetrate rock layers", Masao Dahlgren, a weapons specialist at the Washington-based think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, told AFP. Its effectiveness lies in the detonator, which is not activated upon impact, but opens cavities to explode when the bomb enters the bunker, Dahlgren said.
So far, Trump has not personally announced officially which bombs were used in the US strikes on Iranian targets, the Associated Press notes. The bombs have conventional warheads. But the International Atomic Energy Agency's confirmation that Iran is producing highly enriched uranium at Fordow increases the possibility that nuclear material could be released into the air if such a powerful bomb were to hit the site, the agency noted. But the Israeli strikes on the Natanz nuclear facility caused radioactive contamination only at the site itself, not in the surrounding areas, the IAEA also recalled.
In theory, the GBU-57 A/B bombs could be dropped by any bomber capable of carrying such a weight. But currently, the United States has configured and programmed only the B-2 Spirit bombers, which are stealth technology, according to the US military. The B-2 is manufactured by “Northrop Grumman“
According to the manufacturer, the B-2 can carry a payload of up to 18,000 kilograms, but the US Air Force said it had successfully tested a B-2 loaded with two GBU-57 A/B bombs weighing a total of 27,200 kilograms.
The strategic heavy bomber has a range of 11,000 kilometers without refueling and 18,500 kilometers with a single refueling and can reach any point in the world within a few hours, according to the manufacturer.
On Thursday, Trump said he would decide within two weeks whether to strike Iran to give diplomacy and negotiations a chance, but in the end he made the decision in just two days, the Associated Press notes. The B-2 bombers cost $2.1 billion each, making them the most expensive military aircraft ever built, Reuters recalls. Only 21 of them have been produced so far, after the Pentagon's purchase program was cut.
Before the American strikes yesterday, flight tracking sites reported that several B-2 aircraft had taken off from a base in the United States in a westward direction and were heading over the Pacific Ocean, Agence France-Presse recalls. The French agency also recalls that the GBU-57 A/B bombs were first tested in 2004 and the company “Boeing“ won in 2009. contract to mount them on bombers As for the B-2 Spirit bombers, they were first used against Serbian forces in the 1990s, flying non-stop from Missouri to Kosovo. They were later used in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 21st century.